Oyster Babies Come to Upwellers

The 2012 growing season officially began this week.  On Tuesday June 5 Gef delivered 200,000 seed oysters to the following upwellers.  Cattus Island received 50,000 and MYC and IBSP received 25,000 each.  On LBI the following upweller sites got 25,000 each, Surf City, Barnegat Light, Brant Beach and Beach Haven.

This photo shows the average size of a seed oyster to be between 2-3 mm.

1. On Wednesday June 6, Gef came to Cattus Island with 3 million eyed larvae oysters to start this year’s Spat-on-Shell remote setting project.  A good number of RCTB members and  “clam college” students were in attendance along with a group of students from Ocean County College who happened on a nature field trip with the park naturalist Chris Claus.    Bill Shadel from the American Littoral Society was given the task of distributing the larvae into the tank.  The larvae will set on the surf clam shells in one to three days and become spat.  The oysters will than remain there for their entire life span.  In four weeks we will take the shell bags with their spat to the reef at Good Luck Point.

Two References on the History of Oysters

I was recently made aware of two very interesting references dealing with the history of the oyster in America.  Lisa Frosberg pointed out to me that the current issue of the Smithsonian magazine has an article titled “The Decades-Long Come-back of Mark Twain’s Favorite Food” by Andrew Beahrs

It deals mainly with the West Coast native oyster called the Olympia.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/The-Decades-Long-Comeback-of-Mark-Twains-Favorite-Food.html

The second reference is a book entitled “The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell” by Mark Kurlansky.  Here is a review of the book

From Publishers Weekly Here's a chatty, free-wheeling history of New York City told from the humble perspective of the once copious, eagerly consumed, now decimated eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginicas). Research addict Kurlansky (Cod, etc.) starts from the earliest evidence of Lenape oyster middens, or beds, discovered by explorer Henry Hudson and others as evidence that natives enjoyed the shellfish as a delicacy, much as the Europeans did. When the Dutch arrived, the estuary of the lower Hudson, with its rich confluence of rivers, contained 350 square miles of oyster beds—"fully half of the world's oysters." The huge oyster stores contributed mightily to the mercantile wealth and natural renown of New Amsterdam, then inherited by the British, who were crazy about oysters; pickled oysters became an important trade with British West Indies slave plantations. While cheap, oysters appealed equally to the rich and poor, prompting famous establishments such as black-owned Downing's oyster cellar and Delmonico's (the enterprising author handily supplies historic recipes). The exhaustion of the city's oyster beds and pollution by sewage effectively eclipsed the consumption of local oysters by the 1920s, yet the lowly oyster still promotes the health of the waterways by its natural filtering system as well as indicating the purity of the water. Kurlansky's history digresses all over the place, and sparkles.