"A little oyster is born, then, in the water. At first, about five to ten hours after he and at least a few hundred thousand of his mother's eggs have been fertilized by his potent and unknown sire, he is merely a larva. He is small, but he is free-swimming ... and he swims thus freely for about two weeks, wherever the tides and his peculiar whims may lead him. He is called a spat.
"It is to be hoped, sentimentally at least, that the spat — our spat — enjoys himself. Those two weeks are his one taste of vagabondage, of devil-may-care free roaming. And even they are not quite free, for during all his youth he is busy growing a strong foot and a large supply of sticky cementlike stuff. If he thought, he might wonder why.
"The two weeks up, he suddenly attaches himself to the first clean hard object he bumps into. His fifty million brothers who have not been eaten by fish may or may not bump into anything clean and hard, and those who do not, die. But our spat has been lucky, and in great good spirits he clamps himself firmly to his home, probably forever. He is by now about one-seventy-fifth of an inch long, whatever that may be ... and he is an oyster."
M.F.K. Fisher Consider the Oyster
M.F.K. Fisher's 1941 book celebrates the life and legends of that humble bivalve, the oyster. And there is much to celebrate.
Packed with protein, carbs and lipids, our little pals are tasty and nutritious, and a dozen raw contain less than 120 calories (not counting saltines and cocktail sauce). Famed as an aphrodisiac from the moment Venus stepped off her half-shell, the oyster is truly one of nature's most perfect foods.
Filtering 50-100 gallons of water a day the oyster is also one of nature's most perfect habitat cleaners.
Today, it's also one of the most threatened. Even before the spill, oyster reefs were stressed by water pollution and overfishing. Reef degradation was serious enough that University of Florida marine biologist David Kimbro announced a multi-state, multi-institution study of U.S. oyster reefs.
Now, up and down the Gulf Coast, and particularly in Louisiana's marshes, the Eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) is facing a sea of poison. To keep oil and dispersants out of the marshes, the state is increasing the flow of freshwater in.
The oysters, as Nicholls State professor and estuarine researcher Earl Melancon, points out, are damned if they do, damned if they don't:
"The worst case scenario is that we could get it from both ends," Melancon said. "Our inter-tidal oysters could get hit by the oil and dispersant, and the reefs inside could be hurt by the fresh water.
"If that happens, we not only lose this year's crop, we lose a lot of our potential to rebuild from the disaster, because those intertidal oysters are where our resupply comes from when the estuary reefs are killed."
Intertidal oyster reefs are found along and just inside the coast, which happen to be the areas that last week began being blanketed with crude oil. These reefs are susceptible to the chemical components in the oil, but they can also be killed by the toxins contained in the chemical dispersants being used to break up the oil plumes, Melancon said.
. . .
"Oil, dispersants and too much fresh water can harm oysters at every phase of their life cycle."
T-P: "Oysters are uniquely sensitive to Gulf of Mexico oil spill" 5/25/10
More than half of Louisiana's oyster beds are closed with more to come. All harvesting in Alabama has stopped as oil laps Dauphin Island. The Florida beds off Appalachacola were opened early to allow oystermen to harvest what they can before the black tide arrives. Texans are looking nervously eastward and gathering oysters from Galveston Bay for freezing as pre-contamination baseline samples.
The oil disaster's impact on oyster production is still uncertain, but it is sure to be massive. The Gulf states pretty much are the oyster states. NOAA Fisheries' 2008 numbers tell the
story:
2008 US Production
23,182,979 pounds Eastern oyster
11,979,869 pounds Pacific oyster
Eastern oyster by state
Louisiana 12,778,311 pounds
Florida 2,554,897 pounds
Mississippi 2,610,349 pounds
Texas 2,679,207 pounds
Alabama 72,776 pounds
The five Gulf states produce nearly 90% of the country's Eastern oysters. By contrast, Chesapeake Bay states Virginia and Maryland produce just over half a million pounds between them. New England's beds don't even do that well, with Massachusetts and New York harvesting less than 300,000 pounds.
Louisiana, of course, is the big mama of the oyster world, supplying 33-40% of all U.S. oysters, Eastern or Pacific, every year. The marshes and bays along the state's coast are heaven for oysters. But it was the state's decision, in 1886, to allow development of privately leased beds, which lessees seed from public beds, that assured Louisiana's dominance in the oyster game for over a century.
After taking a beating in the hurricanes of 2005, the oyster industry in the state and the Gulf region was on a marked rebound in the last few years, and this year was promising to be a particularly good one. Now oystermen are wondering if they'll ever see harvests like those of past years again.
Of particular concern are the dispersants BP has been using to break up the oil. As the National Academy of Science reported in 2005, dispersants do not remove oil from water, they suspend it in tiny droplets deep in the water column. While this saves a spiller from being associated with surface oil uglying up beaches and birds, it sends the oil droplets to the bottom, where the oysters live. Worse, the droplets are just the right size for the oysters to suck up.
Joseph Romm, writing for Salon, lays out the problem:
And that means subsurface creatures -- from oysters to coral to larval eggs -- that might never have had significant exposure to the oil are now going to get a double whammy, getting hit by the oil and by the dispersants. Worse, the oil droplets are now in a form that looks like food (e.g., the same size as algae) to filter feeders like oysters, which otherwise may only have been exposed to the far lower levels of dissolved oil components found under a typical oil slick. The droplets can also clog up fish gills.
[University of Maryland's Chesapeake Biological Laboratory professor Carys] Mitchelmore noted that "oil contains a whole suite of toxic chemicals, including known carcinogens." The dispersants can lead to far greater accumulation in living organisms of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) -- oil-derived toxic compounds that were found in mussels 19 months after one spill in which dispersants were used. After the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, a study found PAHs had an impact on the developing hearts of both Pacific herring and pink salmon embryos.
The NAS report noted that many traditional lab studies of PAH toxicity use fluorescent lights. But research conducted under conditions equivalent to natural sunlight "indicated toxicity due to PAH increases significantly (from 12 to 50,000 times)." Also, many toxicity studies only look at exposure to PAH over a short period of time, rather than, say, many months. The point is that in the real-world of a massive, chemically dispersed oil spill, toxicity may be thousands of times higher than lab studies suggest.
It seems no oysterman, packer, biologist or journalist can talk about oysters without using the phrase "canary in the coalmine," and for good reason. Living sedentary lives on the boundaries of fresh and saltwater systems, oysters are the ultimate indicator of an estuary's health. How they fare the current crisis will tell us much of the future prospects for the coastal environment along the Gulf.
As for those of us who love the oyster not just as a neighbor but a dinner guest, the city and the nation are getting by with oysters from western Louisiana beds and Texas. There is currently more than enough clean product to supply demand, though prices are up.
There are, in fact, sufficient oysters to satisfy the ravenous hordes expected this weekend at the first annual New Orleans Oyster Festival, where chefs and distributors will show off their finest oyster dishes, amateurs and professionals can indulge in eating contests and shuckers compete in speed trials, all to the strains of the Treme Brass Band, Cowboy Mouth and Irma Thomas. Proceeds will go to the Save Our Coast foundation.
For you, a little lagniappe: my version of oyster artichoke soup. Bon appetit.