Saving Seafood

As Maryland’s wild oyster season starts, experts worry coronavirus fears may reduce demand

October 19, 2020 — Sitting outside Mama’s on the Half Shell restaurant in Canton, Alisha Gladfelter painted the newly christened “Shuck Shack,” an outdoor oyster bar complete with a grill fashioned from a keg. The swirl of a mermaid’s tail — part of the restaurant’s logo — flowed from the tip of her paintbrush.

Mama’s Shuck Shack is a sign of the times, as much as homemade face masks and ubiquitous bottles of hand sanitizer, an effort to encourage passersby to try one of the succulent bivalves or a dozen, either roasted or raw.

Maryland’s wild oyster season starts in October, but restaurants, watermen and others worry the coronavirus pandemic will stifle demand for the bay’s briny bounty. With few people dining out at restaurants and colder weather limiting outdoor dining, some in the seafood industry worry customers won’t venture out for oysters on the half shell and po’boys.

Throughout Maryland’s summer crab season, demand for the crustaceans remained fairly steady, even with crab houses and seafood restaurants closed or otherwise limited by the pandemic. True to form, Marylanders stuck by their crabs, picking up carryout bushels for smaller home-based feasts.

But carryout oysters? Remains to be seen.

“Most people don’t know how to shuck oysters without cutting themselves up real bad,” said Robert T. Brown, president of the Maryland Watermen’s Association.

Read the full story at The Baltimore Sun

NORTH CAROLINA: Rebekah Williams is a pearl in the Carteret County oyster farming industry

October 19, 2020 — Rebekah Williams has vivid memories clamming and gathering oysters with her grandfather on his 10-acre oyster farm.

Her early childhood dream was to become an oyster farmer just like grandpa.

Williams has always loved being on the water, but children have a way of growing up and moving on to other things. After college, Williams came home for the summer and began working at Sammy’s, a local restaurant. Soon, Williams learned that Sammy Boyd had an oyster farm. He also grew up in the fishing industry.

When Williams shared her childhood dream with Boyd of starting a business of farming oysters, Boyd highly encouraged her.

In 2016, she officially obtained a lease from the State of North Carolina and in 2017 began buying “seed oysters.” Seed oysters are tiny oysters as small as 1 millimeter that are raised from larval oysters.

Read the full story at Carolina Coast Online

MASSACHUSETTS: Shortage Of Oysters And Quahogs Expected In The Next Few Years

October 16, 2020 — The number of quahogs and oysters in Falmouth waters will drop precipitously in upcoming years as a result of the pandemic and a lack of manpower needed to manage the shellfish.

The normal 2020 shellfish growing efforts by the Falmouth Marine and Environmental Services department was canceled as the town took social distancing precautions. R. Charles Martinsen III, deputy director of Falmouth’s MES department, estimates there will be a loss of 750,000 to 1 million oysters and a couple million fewer quahogs in years to come.

“We will start to see the loss on recreational oysters in the fall of 2021,” Mr. Martinsen said, based on the animals’ growth cycle. Future recreational oyster propagation will continue as planned in the 2021 growing year.

“Quahogs take an extra year to grow, so that loss is expected for 2022 in both the commercial and recreational shellfishing area. The harvestable oysters were grown last year, and harvestable quahogs were propagated two to three years ago,” he said.

The legal minimum size for oysters is 3 inches in length. The legal minimum harvest size for quahogs is a 1-inch thickness at the hinge.

Read the full story at The Falmouth Enterprise

Cape Cod’s oyster growers struggle to recover from pandemic losses

October 12, 2020 — When Gov. Charlie Baker shut down restaurants and bars in March, Zack Dixon’s world, and that of hundreds of other shellfish farmers in Barnstable County, dropped off a cliff.

“Restaurants are our customers. When they closed in March, our business revenues went to zero,” said Dixon, who co-owns the Holbrook Oyster company with Justin and Jacob Dalby.

Over the past couple of decades, oysters have become the darling of the culinary world and aquaculture has expanded exponentially. Massachusetts landed nearly 8.7 million pounds of oysters, mostly from aquaculture farming, in 2018, worth $28.3 million. The Cape is home to 265 of the 391 licensed growers in the state, cultivating nearly 661 acres, half the state total of 1,203 acres.

When the East Coast Shellfish Growers Association surveyed larger dealers and wholesalers following the shutdown, they found that 98% of the market for oysters had evaporated overnight, said association president Bob Rheault.

“We knew we were inextricably tied to the food service industry, we didn’t realize how tied in we were,” said Rheault. “I don’t think any one of us would have guessed that amount.”

Read the full story at the Cape Cod Times

Rhode Island Oyster Farmer Leads the Way in Aquaculture

September 25, 2020 — Nearly 20 years ago when Perry Raso leased a 1-acre piece of Potter Pond in South County to farm oysters, aquaculture was in its infancy in the Ocean State.

Raso, then in his early 20s, was only the 15th person to obtain a lease from the state and called himself a stockholder in the pond where he spent part of every day.

Today, the entrepreneurial owner of the Matunuck Oyster Farm and the Matunuck Oyster Bar nurtures 16 million oysters in different stages of growth on 7 acres in the saltwater estuary a stone’s throw from the Atlantic Ocean.

His farm is now one of 70 similar aquaculture operations across the state.

The farmed oysters mature slowly under about 4 feet of water in polyethylene bags that are open to the sea at one end of the pond.

The oysters extract algae from the water that flows through the baskets on the rising and falling tides, said Raso, 39.

He has about 2,000 bags of oysters growing in the pond at any one time. The farm crew tends the operation daily and passes the oysters through a tumbler apparatus frequently to separate them by size in the growing process.

Read the full story at Lancaster Farming

Project aims to boost Louisiana oyster safety and profits

September 9, 2020 — LSU researchers have launched a project that aims to give Louisiana oyster harvesters a way of detecting whether waters contain viruses or bacteria that can cause some people to get sick when they eat the shellfish raw or undercooked.

“This project is meant to decrease the number of people getting sick and also decrease oyster recalls,” civil and environmental engineering professor Zhiqiang Deng said in a news release. “The project will aid in the economic development of Louisiana by reducing costly oyster ground closures and recalls, thereby increasing oyster production.”

One-third to 40% of the oysters harvested in the U.S. come from Louisiana waters, more than any other state. The industry employs about 4,000 people in the state, with an economic impact of $317 million annually, according to the Louisiana Seafood Promotion & Marketing Board.

About a fifth of all oysters harvested in Louisiana come from the Terrebonne Basin, an area that includes all of Terrebonne and parts of Lafourche and several other parishes between the Acthafalaya River and Bayou Lafourche, state figures show.

Read the full story at Houma Today

MARYLAND: Land-based salmon farm proposed for Chesapeake’s Eastern Shore

September 3, 2020 — The Chesapeake Bay is known to many for the seafood it produces: blue crabs, oysters and striped bass.

In a few years, though, the Bay region could become a major producer of an even more popular seafood that doesn’t come from the Chesapeake. A Norwegian company, AquaCon, has unveiled plans to raise salmon on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

AquaCon executives intend to build a $300 million indoor salmon farm on the outskirts of Federalsburg in Caroline County. By 2024, they aim to harvest 3 million fish a year weighing 14,000 metric tons — an amount on par with Maryland’s annual commercial crab catch.

If that goes as planned, the company expects to build two more land-based salmon farms on the Shore over the next six or seven years, bringing production up to 42,000 tons annually. That’s more than the Baywide landings of any fish or shellfish, except for menhaden, and more valuable commercially.

AquaCon’s announcement comes amid a rush by mostly European aquaculture companies to supply Americans with farmed salmon. Another Norwegian company is preparing for its first full harvest later this year from a facility south of Miami, and plans have been announced to build big indoor salmon farms in Maine and on the West Coast. Two small U.S.-based salmon operations in the Midwest also are moving to expand production.

Read the full story at the Bay Journal

MAINE: Portland Fish Exchange looks to shore up its future with aquaculture

September 3, 2020 — The Portland Fish Exchange is launching a new oyster sorting and bagging operation inside its cold, cavernous auction warehouse in hopes of growing the state’s aquaculture economy and diversifying a business plan that’s taken a beating since local ground fish landings collapsed.

On Wednesday, the Exchange received the first of what it hopes will be many oyster deliveries. Two employees measured, sorted, bagged and tagged five 100-count bags of Eastern oysters harvested by Running Tide, a two-year-old aquaculture company that operates a hatchery in Harpswell and grows oysters, clams and scallops at three coastal Maine locations.

“Ground fish landings have been going down, down, down for years,” said Bert Jongerden, the longtime general manager of the exchange. “The numbers told us we had to find something else. So we thought, let’s do for aquaculture what we’ve done for ground fishermen. Give them the shoreside support they need to focus on harvesting instead of chasing down sales.”

The pearly white shelled oysters, which measure from 2 ½ inches to 5 inches from hinge to outer shell fan, have rounded edges created from being tumbled, or stirred, to avoid being chipped when shucked, and deep pockets that hint at the plump meat inside. This first harvest is bound for The Shop, a raw bar on Washington Avenue, to be served up on Friday.

Read the full story at the Portland Press Herald

Contaminants found in oysters could portend larger environmental and food safety problem

August 10, 2020 — New research suggests contamination of oyster beds with plastics, paint, and baby formula in Asia could reveal a larger emerging global public health risk.

Scientists from the University of California, Irvine, in collaboration with Environmental Defense Fund, Cornell University, and Australia’s University of Queensland, found traces of plastics, kerosene, paint, talc, and milk supplement powders in the beds on the eastern Andaman Sea of Myanmar.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Seafood industry navigates rough waters as debts, inventory rise higher

August 4, 2020 — When it comes to business plans during the coronavirus pandemic, the seafood industry has found itself at sea.

“We don’t have a clue,” said Jure Slabic, an oysterman in Galveston, Texas. “We haven’t processed a single oyster since March 23.”

More than most foodstuffs, the seafood industry depends on restaurants that put a premium on freshness. Consequently, the coronavirus shutdowns slammed fishers, leaving boats at the dock, inventory stacked or tossed as debt piles up.

Read the full story at The Washington Times