Saving Seafood

MASSACHUSETTS: 15th Annual Wellfleet Oysterfest

Saturday and Sunday
October 17 & 18 2015
10 a.m – 5 p.m. 

The 15th annual Wellfleet OysterFest is next weekend. Come join us for a weekend full of hometown flavor and big time fun!

Highlights this year include:

  • 84 Artisans, 32 food vendors and 17 marine, environmental non-profits and community organizations.
  • Live Music performed by CrabGrass; The Daggers; the Rip it Ups with special guests like Steve Shook, Jordan Renzi, Rayssa Rabeiro, Sarah Burrill and Mac Hay; The Catie Flynn Band; Chandler Travis Philharmonic; and Sarah Swain and the Oh Boys.
  • The Family Fun Area will feature educational activities, crafts, moon bounces, clowns, face painting and performances geared for the young at heart – Cape Cod African Dance and Drum, Treavor the Juggler, The Elbows, the Keltic Kids and fortune teller Sufi Lin!
  • The event’s signature tasting program,  Taste the Terroir and Merroir, and cooking demos by local chefs such as Philippe Rispole and Sarah Chase, and featuring the beloved oyster will be held at Wellfleet Preservation Hall.
  • Educational programs will be held at the Wellfleet Public Library and offered by our partners, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries Service, Green Harbors Boston, and Mass Audubon Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary.
  • Walking tours will be offered by Mass Audubon Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary staff. A tour of the Wellfleet Oyster Propagation site will also be offered by the lead research scientist.
  • Thanks to a partnership with Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater (WHAT) and the Woods Hole Film Festival, film screenings will be held at WHAT on Friday and Saturday evenings.
  • The Wellfleet Recreation Department will host activities such as the popular Shuck n’ Run, the Tennis and Pickle Ball Round Robin, the SK8 Competition and a sunset a dance party.
  • And of course, the Annual Oyster Shucking Competition!

Admission is $5 for one day, $8 for two days and children 12 and under are free. Tickets may be purchased at the event or in advance online. Click here to purchase tickets now!

Click here to register for one of the exciting culinary programs or for a detailed Schedule of Activities.

Learn more about the Wellfleet Oysterfest

ALABAMA: Gulf’s First Oyster Farmer Continues to Grow

September 25, 2015 — POINT AUX PINS, Alabama — Starting as a volunteer oyster gardener way back at the turn of the century – that’s the year 2000 for those with short memory – Steve Crockett planted the first off-bottom oysters in the Gulf as a reef restoration project for the Mobile Bay National Estuary program. Fifteen years later Point Aux Pins Alabama farm is one of the largest Gulf off-bottom oyster operations supplying restaurants and grocery chains across the South.

Gathering figures on the success rate of the restoration project, a grad student informed Crockett that data confirmed he had the best oyster growth rate of any sites on the eastern or western shores of the Bay, Dauphin Island, or Coden. That was enough to convince him to try growing oysters, at least for his own use and for friends.

“We started production the following year,” said Crockett. “We adopted the Australian Adjustable Longline Method for growing our oysters. We fiddled around with that for a couple of years but ended up losing our shirts, as well as our camp house, when Katrina stuck the Alabama coast in 2005.”

Three years later, and with a new house, Crockett was determined to try once more to farm caged grown oysters.

“This was about the same time Bill Walton appeared at the Auburn University Shellfish Lab,” he told Gulf Seafood News. “He was instrumental in our decision to get back into off-bottom caged oysters.”

Getting seed from Walton’s Auburn shellfish lab, in 2009 the East Grand Bay oysterman put his first crop of oysters in the water, while at the same time testing four different kinds of grow out gear.

Read the full story at Gulf Seafood Institute

 

BRITISH COLUMBIA: Oyster Ban cost them $1.5 million, Island growers say

September 18, 2015 — VANCOUVER, B.C. — The Island-based B.C. shellfish industry briefly celebrated the lifting of a raw oyster ban in Vancouver restaurants on Thursday. But the industry then settled into damage control as it tallied the cost of the month-long ban and potential damage to its reputation.

The B.C. Shellfish Growers Association said the ban, prompted by a bacteria caused by hot weather and warm water temperatures, cost oyster growers about $50,000 a day, or more than $1.5 million. Despite the ban being restricted to Greater Vancouver, word travelled abroad and likely hurt global sales.

“This is a huge loss to our industry and we hope we can recover,” Roberta Stevenson, executive director of the Comox-based B.C. Shellfish Growers Association, said Thursday. “It’s an industry made up of small family farms. They couldn’t sell anything for a month. No income. People were laid off. How do you make up for something like that? You don’t. You lose it.”

Stevenson said the hope is that consumers will come back to B.C. oysters. “I just hope [consumers] don’t stick to a P.E.I. or a New Zealand product,” she said. “We’re a small industry and any lack of confidence in our product is damaging.

“I hope people go out tonight and tomorrow and the next day and eat some B.C. oysters.”

Stevenson said almost the entire B.C. oyster industry is centred on Vancouver Island, with about 50 per cent of production in the Deep Bay area. The growers’ association has 130 members.

Read the full story at Times Colonist

 

The Aging Oyster And Clam Hatchery That’s Behind A Multimillion-Dollar Industry

September 7, 2015 — As traditional fish stocks in New England continue to decline and the industry endures greater restrictions, fishermen have been creating a new line of work: They are becoming farmers — shellfish farmers.

The cultivation of oysters and clams has become big business in Massachusetts, especially on Cape Cod, but the one source for the state’s $25 million aquaculture industry almost shut its doors.

From Oyster Seeds The Size Of ‘Pepper,’ A Family Business Grew

Myron Taylor is out on Wellfleet Harbor. He’s 74 and has been been raising clams and oysters here since he was a kid.

“And back in the old time when we had to pick up all the oysters seeds on the beach, in order to get them to grow, and it took about four years to get an oyster to grow,” he says.

Those wild oyster seeds Taylor picked up off the beach years ago were juvenile oysters and clams that he would plant in nearby waters. But that traditional method for growing shellfish was very slow and often did not yield much product. So like most fishermen on the Cape, Taylor caught cod, flounder and other groundfish to earn a living.

In the late 1980s, when those stocks became scarce, Taylor turned to lobstering. It was around that time he heard about some scientists in Dennis who were harvesting tiny clam seeds and selling them to fishermen to grow.

Read the full story and listen to the audio at WBUR

Texas Attorney General Files Oyster Lawsuit Against Chambers Liberty County Navigation District and STORM

August 5, 2015 — GALVESTON, Texas — Storm clouds circling Galveston Bay have collided releasing what promises to be a hurricane of paperwork, legal wrangling and an inevitable end to the “Battle for the Bay” that has for more than a year compromised oyster production, damaged businesses and hurt the American oyster consumer.

On the final day of July, the Texas Attorney General’s office, on behalf of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD), filed a lawsuit naming Chamber-Liberty Counties Navigation District (CLCND) and Sustainable Texas Oyster Resource Management (STORM) as attempting to circumvent the state’s sole authority and jurisdiction to regulate the conservation and harvesting of oysters, mussels, and clams from state waters by executing an unauthorized lease.

According to the petition filed by Texas Assistant Attorney General Craig Pritzlaff, the CLCND and STORM have entered into an illegal lease on more than 23,000 acres of submerged lands and waters within Galveston Bay which the State legislature has vested the TPWD with sole authority and jurisdiction to regulate. By granting the lease, the District and its Commissioners subverted, preempted and interfered with the state’s regulatory and conservation programs.

The District and STORM have asserted unlawful possession over oysters in state waters and STORM is attempting to exclude entities from lawfully harvesting oysters. Through the lawsuit, the state is looking to void the lease and seeks restitution from STORM and the District.

Read the full story at Gulf Seafood Institute Newsroom

 

 

Conservationists Making Headway In Rebuilding Oyster Populations in New Jersey Barnegat Bay

July 30, 2015 — BARNEGAT BAY NJ — A team of animal conservationists have begun re-establishing the local colony of oyster in New Jersey by releasing more than a million seedlings of the shellfish, known as spat, off of Barnegat Bay.

Members of the American Littoral Society sent off around 1.5 million oyster spat in Ocean Gate, which were then taken to an artificial reef system located around a quarter-mile off of the township of Berkeley known as Good Luck Point.

The group was joined by several other volunteers on boats in taking the seedlings to the reef, where they released the oysters into Barnegat Bay before returning to shore.

The goal of the Littoral Society with the oyster colony is to improve the quality of the water in the bay through the shellfish’s natural ability to filter out impurities and pollutants in the ocean.

The group also believes that by bolstering the number of oysters found in Barnegat Bay, the creatures can help strengthen the shoreline against the effects of devastating weather occurrences such as Superstorm Sandy. The hard shells of oysters and the raise profile and irregular shape of their beds can considerably reduce the impact of storm surges waves on the bay’s shoreline.

The presence of the oyster colonies also boosts the local boating and recreational fishing industries as it provides habitats for other sea creatures such as crabs and fish.

Read the full story at the Tech Times

 

MARK BITTMAN: What oysters tell us about ocean acidification

July 21, 2015 — MARK BITTMAN — This is kind of the good news/bad news department, as so many things are: The good news is that terrific oysters are being farmed in several locations in California; the bad news is that ocean acidification — the absorption of carbon dioxide into the sea, a direct result of high levels of carbon in the atmosphere — is a direct threat to that industry.

I saw both when I visited Hog Island Oyster Co. in Marshall, an operation north of San Francisco on Tomales Bay. (Actually, I’ve eaten at and of Hog Island dozens of times, and even shot video there for a PBS series more than 10 years ago.)

Read the full story and watch the video at The New York Times 

 

Oysters could be grown in tanks to avoid weather conditions threatening industry’s future, researchers say

July 15, 2015 — Oyster growers in New South Wales may soon move their oysters into land-based tanks in an attempt to protect them from weather conditions threatening the future of the industry.

A research project is underway at the National Marine Science Centre in Coffs Harbour, looking into the viability of growing oysters in tanks for more than three weeks.

Sydney Rock Oysters in the very last stages of growth are being kept and fed in tanks and monitored for changes in condition.

Under the plan, growers would remove their oysters from rivers and estuaries late in the growing process, to protect them from floods, storms and pollution events.

Oysters are vulnerable to weather events and water pollution, and industry regulations often see large quantities of oysters labelled not fit for sale.

Heavy rain events can close estuaries for months at a time due to poor water quality.

The centre’s aquaculture operations manager, Ken Cowden, said they wanted to find out if it was viable to remove oysters from their natural environment for so long.

Read the full story from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation