Saving Seafood

NORTH CAROLINA: Group to Get Grant to Build Oyster Reefs

August 23, 2016 — The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has given preliminary approval to a $1.3 million grant to the N.C. Coastal Federation for oyster restoration in Pamlico Sound, boosting the organization’s multi-decade efforts to turn the state into what founder and executive director Todd Miller believes can be “the Napa Valley” of oysters.

The money is part of $9 million for 17 habitat-restoration projects in coastal states. NOAA recommended all of the projects last month. Final approval depends on a legal review and on NOAA’s budget for the new fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. The federation could receive as much as $4.3 million over a three-year period.

Miller said he believes that will happen, because even though federal budget appropriations have been uncertain in recent years, this program has been consistently well-funded. Either way, he said, it’s one of the most significant grants his organization has received, both in amount, but especially in potential effects on the state’s economy and a crucial part of its marine the environment.

In large part, that’s because the money leverages existing state appropriations to increase the acres of reef restored in North Carolina’s sounds. This year the state legislature appropriated $1.3 million for oyster restoration efforts in the state. The federal grant doubles the total funds available for oyster restoration in the next year.

As a result, Miller said, the federation and the state will embark on a joint effort that will be “industrial in scale” and will undoubtedly create jobs, both now, during construction, and in the future, as the oysters attracted to the reefs are harvested and sold.

Read the full story at Coastal Review Online

Maryland aquaculture leasing streamlined

August 19, 2016 — Federal regulators unveiled this week a new, “more streamlined” process by which Maryland oyster farmers can lease places in the Chesapeake Bay for raising their shellfish.

The revised permitting procedures announced by the Baltimore District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers come in response to long-voiced complaints from oyster farmers – backed up by Maryland’s U.S. senators – about delays and red tape in obtaining aquaculture leases.

The Corps said it is replacing a regional general permit, which it issued in 2011, with what it calls a Nationwide permit, which the agency says provides a “more streamlined” way to authorize new aquaculture activities.

The new process, which took effect Aug. 15, includes allowing unlimited acreage to be leased, and speeding up handling of proposed aquaculture projects by having federal and state officials review plans at the same time rather than sequentially.

Until now, oyster farmers were limited to leasing 50 acres if raising shellfish loose on the bottom, five acres if rearing them in cages and three acres if keeping them in floats near the water surface. If a grower wanted more, he or she had to apply for an individual permit, which required more review, more public notice and a hearing.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

Old Line Fish Co. delivers Chesapeake Bay seafood in Maryland’s first community-supported fishery

August 9, 2016 — As a lifelong Maryland resident, Stephanie Hall has eaten plenty of oysters. But she’d never shucked one herself until she received a share of the shelled mollusks from Old Line Fish Co. this summer.

Hall was among the earliest customers of the region’s first community-supported fishery. Similar to community-supported agriculture, Old Line Fish Co. allows customers to buy shares of local seafood for biweekly pickups. The seafood in each delivery varies from week to week depending on fish and shellfish in local watermen’s catches.

An offshoot of the Oyster Recovery Partnership, a nonprofit that works to restore the Chesapeake Bay’s oyster population, Old Line Fish Co. is as much about educating customers as delivering fresh seafood. In its first season, the organization introduced customers to the watermen who caught their meals, provided some unfamiliar foods and suggested new cooking processes.

Oysters were just one of the species that made it into Hall’s reusable bag stamped with an “Old Line Fish Co.” seal — the Annapolis resident didn’t even have a shucking knife until she bought one on the way home from picking up her share and grilled the oysters on the half-shell.

“If I’m going to say I’m a Marylander, I better be able to shuck an oyster,” said Hall, a Maryland Department of Natural Resources biologist who monitors water quality.

Read the full story from The Baltimore Sun

Maturing oyster recovery projects bring calls for money

July 26, 2016 — LITTLE EGG HARBOR, N.J. — Oysters were once so abundant in New Jersey that vacationers would clamber off trains, wade into the water and pluck handfuls to roast for dinner. Their colonies piled so high that boats would sometimes run aground on them, and they were incorporated into navigation maps. Even earlier, Native American tribes would have oyster feasts on the banks of coastal inlets.

But over the centuries, rampant development, pollution, overharvesting and disease drastically reduced the number of oysters, here and around the country; many researchers and volunteer groups estimate oyster populations are down 85 percent from their levels in the 1800s.

That has sparked efforts throughout the coastal United States to establish new oyster colonies, or fortify struggling ones. Though small in scale, the efforts are numerous and growing, and they have a unified goal: showing that oysters can be successfully restored in the wild, paving the way for larger-scale efforts and the larger funding they will require.

While a main goal is increasing the numbers of succulent, salty shellfish bound for dinner plates, oysters also serve other useful purposes. They improve water quality; a single oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day. They also can protect coastlines; the hard, irregular oyster beds serve as speed bumps that obstruct waves during storms.

“It’s many years and millions of dollars away, but it is attainable,” said Steve Evert, assistant director of the Marine Science and Environmental Field Station at New Jersey’s Stockton University, one of hundreds of organizations working to start or expand oyster colonies.

Most of the projects are small-scale, funded by government grants and volunteer donations. Helen Henderson, of New Jersey’s American Littoral Society, which is growing an oyster reef in Barnegat Bay, hopes successful demonstration projects can lead to an exponential increase in funding for bigger projects.

“Nature has shown us this can be done; we’re just giving it a kick-start,” she said. “Hopefully funding will flow from that once we can show successful outcomes, and we can really make a difference on a much larger scale.”

Read the full story at the Oneida Daily Dispatch

‘Ugly’ snails, once ignored by fishermen, now a prized catch

July 7, 2016 — LITTLE COMPTON, R.I. — Cooking a channeled whelk is not for the squeamish. But sliced and sprinkled over a bed of linguine, it’s a chewy delicacy in old-fashioned Italian eateries along the East Coast.

The sea snails known by Italian-Americans as scungilli used to be such a niche market that fishermen ignored them when they turned up in lobster traps or oyster dredges.

Now they’re a prized commodity. Because of growing demand in Asia and the collapse of other industries, such as lobster, fishermen searching for something else to catch are keeping and selling the big marine snails.

“There’s an international market for the product, primarily in Hong Kong and South China,” said Rick Robins, who owns Bernie’s Conchs in Virginia and manages export sales for Chesapeake Bay Packing. “It’s a popular item in Cantonese cooking.”

Most people who order a plate of scungilli probably haven’t seen one of the hairy-shelled gastropods in the wild. A voracious predator, it crawls along the bottom of Atlantic coastal inlets from Nantucket Sound to North Carolina’s Outer Banks, piercing its razor-edged proboscis into clams and other prey.

“They’re not like their Caribbean cousin,” said Rhode Island fisherman Greg Mataronas, comparing it to the tropical, vegetarian conch. “They’re the Northern, ugly version. Their faces are a hunk of meat.”

It’s an increasingly lucrative hunk of meat: A large whelk can be sold for as much as $7 in a live market.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the New Jersey Herald

North Carolina spending, researching to get more tasty, earth friendly oysters

July 5, 2016 — MANTEO, N.C. — North Carolina will spend more than $1.6 million improving the habitats of oysters living in its waters.

The money will go toward further restoring oyster sanctuaries in the Pamlico and Albemarle sounds in hopes the species will rebound to levels not seen in decades.

“The General Assembly’s new budget takes big steps toward making coastal North Carolina the Napa Valley of oysters,” Todd Miller, founder and executive director of the North Carolina Coastal Federation, said in a news release.

The state’s 2015 wild oyster harvest of 119,000 pounds is nearly 20,000 pounds less than in 2014 but still much higher than in the 1990s and 1980s when diseases decimated the population.

The total population was 800,000 pounds in 1889, when scientists first began measuring the catch. It fell to 200,000 pounds by 1960.

Read the full story at the Virginian-Pilot

North Carolina Budget Marks $1.4 Million for Oyster Work

June 29, 2016 — Coastal conservationists and shellfish growers are cheering new investments in the state’s oyster industry included in the state budget compromise.

The $22.34 billion spending plan announced Monday includes $1.03 million in one-time funding to build oyster sanctuaries in Pamlico Sound. Also, a $300,000, non-recurring, shellfish rehabilitation fund will go to build new oyster reefs all along the coast. The budget also includes $149,000, recurring, for two new positions at the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries to accelerate shellfish industry growth and increase shellfish production and recycling.

“The General Assembly’s new budget takes big steps toward making coastal North Carolina the Napa Valley of oysters,” said Todd Miller, executive director of the North Carolina Coastal Federation. “This funding will help implement the state’s blueprint for restoring the oyster industry and help attract more federal money to restore our oyster beds.”

The budget also provides $100,000 to clean up abandoned crab pots in state waters.

Advocates say boosting the shellfish industry can benefit coastal communities by providing work for fishermen and marine contractors and improving water quality.

Read the full story at Coastal Review Online

Recent heavy rains, flooding take toll on Texas oysters

June 16, 2016 — GALVESTON, Texas — Johnny Halili tossed an open oyster shell overboard. Like most of the oysters culled from the floor of Galveston Bay on Tuesday, it was dead.

“Three more years,” he said.

The Galveston County Daily News reports recent heavy rains and flooding along the Brazos River sent freshwater draining into the bay, pushing down the bay’s salinity — the amount of salt in the water. The influx of freshwater is choking some young oysters.

Oysters are resilient animals. But Texas’ oysters have taken a succession of hits in recent years: first it was Hurricane Ike in 2008, which dumped sediment over the bay floor; then prolonged drought, which made the water too salty. Now, heavy rains are the latest assault on oysters.

For oystermen, Mother Nature’s twists and turns have created a costly waiting game.

Halili, who with his wife, Lisa, owns Prestige Oysters in San Leon, tested salinity levels at some of his oyster leases last week after days of rain and flooding. One of his tests found a salinity level of zero parts per thousand, or freshwater.

Oysters thrive with salinity levels around 14 parts per thousand, Halili said.

Read the full story from the Associated Press at the Galveston County Daily News

A Revolution in Southern Farmed Oysters

June 14, 2016 — On a recent Tuesday morning, Brian Rackley ate oysters for breakfast. He slipped a little knife into the neck and popped the shell, cut the foot. He took in a long, deep breath, quietly considering the bivalve’s aromatics, and slurped the thing out of the shell. After a moment’s thought, he scribbled a couple of words in a Moleskine notebook: “Driftwood, Shrimp Bisque.”

Rackley runs the oyster program at Kimball House, a restaurant that occupies a former train station in Atlanta, Georgia. It is a fine place, where diners sit in tufted leather booths and order caviar service and cocktails that arrive in chilled, antique glassware. The oyster menu that Rackley maintains is suitably elaborate, an ever-changing list of 20-odd varieties of oysters sourced from across the continent: Puget Sound, Washington, to Edgecomb, Maine.

Rackley eats oysters for breakfast, before even a cup of coffee, so that his palate will be unadulterated when he writes his tasting notes, those subtle distinctions of flavor and aroma that help his customers navigate the qualities of oysters. His notebook is filled with little phrases and lists of words: “citrus, lettuce & cucumber”; “celery salted wild mushroom”; “cedar and spinach”; “rich clay & minerals, perfect with Muscadet.”

Oysters are a finicky business. Those subtle distinctions in flavor can be erased into blandness by a heavy rain. They can take years to produce but days to spoil. The vagaries of water and air temperatures, the complicated seasonal intersections of rainfall and tides, all the uncontrollable whims of nature conspire to affect oyster production. Rackley is constantly changing his menu to accommodate new oysters, removing unavailable ones.

The most notable change on Rackley’s menu, though, is the growing presence of farmed oysters from the Gulf of Mexico. High-end oyster bars have long depended on well-known oyster farms like Hama Hama, Island Creek, and others where oyster farming techniques go back decades, if not longer.

Read the full story at Pacific Standard

MASSACHUSETTS: Chilmark Adopts Detailed Rules to Monitor Oyster Growers

May 19, 2016 — New shellfish regulations in Chilmark aim to better monitor the 10 oyster grants in Menemsha Pond and protect the town’s inshore fisheries.

Following a public hearing on Tuesday, the selectmen unanimously adopted the regulations, as drafted by the town shellfish department.

For the first time, anyone holding an aquaculture permit in town must provide an annual report to the selectmen that includes harvest data, approximate numbers of adult and seed oysters at the site, and a record of mortalities and growing conditions, among other things.

“We really had a lack of aquaculture rules in general for the town,” shellfish constable Isaiah Scheffer said Wednesday. “We need to make sure that everybody that has an oyster grant is compliant.”

Read the full story at the Vineyard Gazette