Saving Seafood

TEXAS: Texas sees soaring interest in oyster license buybacks

July 1, 2025 — The Texas Park & Wildlife Department’s commercial oyster boat license buyback program saw interest this year from 115 license holders looking to sell — more than in all of the program’s previous years combined.

Lisa Halili, vice president of Prestige Oysters, 103 First St. in Dickinson, said the increased interest is because the state has closed the harvest areas where smaller boats could go, meaning operators can’t put their licenses to use anymore.

Halili isn’t among the operators offering to sell back their licenses.

The department also has changed how the buyback program works, however, which is driving interest among license holders, Zach Thomas, a policy coordinator for department’s Coastal Fisheries division, said.

‘Oyster Renaissance’ in Chesapeake Continues as Total in Bay Hits Major Milestone

March 14, 2024 — The Chesapeake Oyster Alliance has announced a major milestone as it has recorded a new total of 6 billion oysters directly added to the Bay since 2017.

Following a banner year for Chesapeake Bay oyster restoration and aquaculture, the alliances count aims to include all oysters directly added to the Bay and its tributaries through restoration and aquaculture. These efforts have now surpassed the halfway mark to the group’s goal to promote adding 10 billion new oysters to the Bay by 2025.

The majority of contributions toward the 10 billion oyster goal come from major restoration initiatives in Maryland and Virginia targeted towards 11 Bay tributaries, which are on track to be completed by 2025.

“We’re seeing an exciting oyster renaissance on the Bay, from massive tributary scale-efforts down to widespread citizen involvement and public awareness,” said Tanner Council, Alliance Senior Manager for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. “At least six billion oysters have been added to the Chesapeake in recent years thanks to heroic work by Maryland and Virginia, federal partners, and COA aquaculture and restoration partners. Each year, the Chesapeake Bay is getting closer to an extremely ambitious goal of adding 10 billion new oysters.”

The following was released by Seafoodnew.com

Maine’s oyster industry sees record sales as more farmers cash in

June 27, 2022 — Maine oyster sales nearly doubled from 2020 to 2021, according to recent data from the Maine Department of Marine Resources. The increase in sales comes from more farmers sprouting along the Maine coast and higher demand after a volatile economic state brought on by the pandemic.

But now, oysters are being celebrated, with the Maine Oyster Festival in Freeport showcasing dozens of oyster farmers, many of which just opened up in the last few years.

“I’m just so excited it’s a beautiful day, a gorgeous day and cool to see everyone out,” Ally Sortwell of Lebanon, Maine, said.

The oyster farmers cashed in on the warm Sunday as sell-outs were reported during the three-day weekend.

Eric Oransky and his crew at Maine Ocean Farms started seeding oysters in 2017 and said hard work and years of waiting go into one oyster.

Read the full story at News Center Maine

 

Texas passes law allowing oyster aquaculture

June 5, 2019 — Texas Governor Greg Abbott recently signed a bill into law establishing a new regulatory framework allowing for oyster aquaculture on the state’s Gulf Coast.

Before passage of House Bill 1300, Texas was the only coastal state in the U.S. that didn’t allow oyster mariculture off its coasts. The new law allows oysters to be raised for their pearls, as well as their shells and meat.

Set to go into effect, the new law requires the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission to adopt rules that would establish a program to regulate the process of growing oysters. Abbott signed the bill into law last month, the last day of the 2019 session of the Texas Legislature.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

NORTH CAROLINA: Forum Links Coastal Scientists, Community

April 19, 2019 — Why should we care about oyster reef growth?

Molly Bost asked the three dozen or so gathered for the first Research Applied to Managing the Coast Symposium, or RAMCS, March 29 at the University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences.

“First off, oysters are important because they filter water,” Bost continued, adding that oyster reefs attenuate waves, provide habitat for commercially and recreationally important fish and are an important, growing fishery for the state.

Bost was among the 15 UNC IMS faculty and students presenting in one of three areas of research: coastal resilience, water quality, and fisheries during the daylong symposium.

Read the full story at Coastal Review Online

Oyster aquaculture limits disease in wild oyster populations

December 17, 2018 — A fisheries researcher at the University of Rhode Island has found that oyster aquaculture operations can limit the spread of disease among wild populations of oysters. The findings are contrary to long-held beliefs that diseases are often spread from farmed populations to wild populations.

“The very act of aquaculture has positive effects on wild populations of oysters,” said Tal Ben-Horin, a postdoctoral fellow at the URI Department of Fisheries, Animal and Veterinary Sciences in the College of the Environment and Life Sciences. “The established way of thinking is that disease spreads from aquaculture, but in fact aquaculture may limit disease in nearby wild populations.”

Working with colleagues at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Rutgers University, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Ben-Horin integrated data from previous studies into mathematical models to examine the interactions between farmed oysters, wild oysters and the common oyster disease Dermo.

Read the full story from the University of Rhode Island at Phys.org

Gulf Coast Looks to Maintain, Restore Oysters

November 26, 2018 — The oyster dressing is safe this year.

Since the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010, 4 billion to 8.3 billion subtidal oysters were estimated to be lost across the Gulf coast. Many states are struggling.

Louisiana is the only state producing at a level at or higher than before the spill, according to Seth Blitch, The Nature Conservancy’s Director of Coastal and Marine Conservation in Louisiana.

“Oysters Gulfwide are kind of in a bad spot, but Louisiana is actually sort of the bright spot in terms of commercial production of oysters. Louisiana produces more oysters than any other state in the country, which is good,” Blitch said.

TNC recently released a report on oyster restoration in the Gulf.

According to the report, there’s been about a 50 percent to 85 percent oyster loss throughout the Gulf when compared to historic levels.

The oyster industry pulls about $220 million to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. The decrease could affect not only oyster harvesters but restaurants and industries that use the shell, such as using it to supplement chicken feed.

Read the full story from The News-Star of Monroe at U.S. News and World Report

Teacher switches to oyster farming

October 4, 2018 — Back when Lauren Gray was working for Commercial Fisheries News, she wrote a couple of feature stories about aquaculture.

“I thought it was really neat,” she said. “But at the time I didn’t have any idea I was going to become an oyster farmer.”

A few years later, when she got a job teaching science, reading and writing at the Ashley Bryan School, she and her husband Josh moved to Islesford. And soon after that she began working in the summers as a sternman for lobstermen Ricky Alley and Danny Fernald.

“I just loved being on the water all the time,” she said. “So, I started thinking about what I could do to make that a life.”

She decided that operating an oyster farm was the answer. She started it three years ago on eight 400-square-foot Limited Purpose Aquaculture (LPA) sites in The Pool, which is nearly surrounded by Great Cranberry Island. She leases the sites from the Maine Department of Marine Resources.

After teaching for five years, Gray left that job when school ended in June to devote herself full time to the business of raising oysters. She sold her first oysters — an order for 24 dozen — the weekend before Labor Day.

“That was pretty exciting,” she said.

“It took them three years to grow to cocktail size, about two-and-a-half to three inches. I’ve just been selling them to people locally. I have a little sign-up sheet at the Great Cranberry General Store.”

Gray said she plans to work on obtaining a license that will allow her to sell her oysters commercially.

Read the full story at the Mount Desert Islander

Lack of Seasonal Worker Visas Straps Chesapeake Seafood Industry

May 30, 2017 — The Chesapeake Bay’s crab, oyster and bait industry has been losing its American workforce since the late 1980s, as the old hands retire and younger workers seek better paying jobs.

The packing houses turned to foreign, seasonal workers to fill the gaps, but the visa program Congress established for that, dubbed H2B, quickly reaches the 66,000 worker cap. And that’s forcing some seafood processing plants to shut down.

For example, the only sound you hear at Cowart Seafood Company’s bait fish packing facility in the Northern Neck of Virginia these days is the incessant buzz of overhead lights. Manager A. J. Erskine says normally the early morning hours are filled with the sounds of the chum grinder, bait filler, skid rollers, fork lifts and crews packing bait into boxes.

“We don’t have the seasonal labor to be able to operate this plant,” he says. “If we run out of product we lose our place in the market and another product will come in and replace us.”

Omega Protein, the Texas based seafood giant, operates a menhaden rendering plant, just down the road from Bevans with local American workers. But spokesman Ben Landry says their Gulf Coast plants compete with year-round oil company jobs, so there, they rely on H2B workers.

“We’ve taken a couple of boats out of service in the Gulf because of this,” he says. “We’ve gotten some employees from U.S. Territories like Puerto Rico. What do we do with the program in the future, I think, really depends on how this season goes because there is a lot of uncertainty with that program now.”

Read the full story at WVTF

Virginia trying to preserve its working waterfronts

December 12, 2016 — Working waterfronts in coastal Virginia are under increasing threats from sea-level rise, subsidence and loss of marine habitat. And the desire to live on the water sometimes clashes with the tradition of working the water.

Earlier this year, Virginia Beach oyster farmers made headlines when they were confronted by waterfront property owners over the number of cages they were putting down in waters used not only commercially but for recreation.

And it’s not an urban problem. Homeowners on the western branch of the Corrotoman River in rural Lancaster County are challenging aquaculture applications there and applying for riparian rights in an effort to block new farms.

“It’s the same as Virginia Beach on a much smaller scale,” said Ben Stagg, who manages shellfish leases for the state. “It’s the same argument: ‘We don’t want somebody right outside our door. We use this area, our kids swim out here, we don’t want a bunch of cages.’ This issue is percolating up statewide.”

Now, after four years of collaboration, working waterfront stakeholders from the Eastern Shore to the Northern Neck have come up with ways to alleviate conflict and to preserve Virginia’s nearly 600 working waterfronts and their commercial fishing heritage.

Of those, 123 are located in the four counties of the Northern Neck. That includes one of Virginia’s oldest and largest industry, Omega Protein Inc.’s menhaden fishing operation in Reedville, which contributes about $88 million to the state’s economy.

Read the full story at the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star