Chinook Observer The mouth of the Willapa Bay and Leadbetter Point are seen from the air in 1978.

WILLAPA BAY — How many people do you know who are passionate about Willapa Bay? Dick Wilson, president of Bay Center Mariculture Co., is certainly one to put on the top of the list.

“I love the bay. I love my bay,” said Wilson, looking out over the Willapa mudflats from the bank of windows in his Bay Center office. “That’s why I choose to work and live here.”

“The bay is a beautifully functioning system — it’s very complex,” he adds. “People at its margin can certainly do harm but it’s certain types of industry that can do the most harm, and so far local citizens have kept the bay safe from that.”

Although regulating the population and development growth around the bay is critical to its health, Wilson feels that much more dangerous is the potential for industrial residues and chemicals that could flow into and be stored in the silts and fine sediments of the bay.

So far, Willapa Bay has been spared the onslaught of these more harmful, persistent chemicals.

Chinook Observer The Willapa Bay stretches out from the Port of Peninusla in Nahcotta, as seen from the air.

Keeping the harvest sustainable

Wilson has a long history with the bay. In the 1970s, Wilson — with his wife Janet, brother Dennis and Arnold Shotwell — chose to settle on Willapa Bay to raise salmon and oysters. With a Ph.D. in geology and minors in zoology and ecology, Wilson is a scientist at heart and has a historical knowledge of the bay that few people possess.

“The concept of the sea ranching salmon I still think to this day can be a sustainable business and economical for the area,” said Wilson, “but it will take years to change the politics and build that system.”

“At Bay Center Mariculture Co., we’ve been harvesting oysters for several decades,” he said. “Willapa Bay produces around 60 percent of the oysters in the state, or better, and probably around 25 percent nationally depending upon the year. That’s a big pile of oysters and they’re excellent, really high-quality oysters.”

“We sell oysters for shucking locally, and we ship two full truckloads a week to California, five dozen oysters in a bag, 50 bags per pallet and 10 pallets in a truck load,” he explained. “We have over 100,000 bushel of oysters in the bay for harvest each year — that creates employment and improves the water quality for other species.”

People versus Industry

“I don’t want to minimize the individual contribution to pollution by the residences around the bay. The ground water with the residues humans can contribute — medications, nitrogen, phosphates — must be contained and blocked from the estuarial system,” Wilson said.

“But by stringent adherence to the state, and thus county, septic standards, I think a pretty high degree of containment is achieved.

“You can overwhelm an area with people at the margins, like in Puget Sound, for instance, where the biggest problem is not having comprehensive zoning to keep people back away from the shore,” he explained.

“However, from what I’ve seen of our zoning laws, they aren’t too bad,” he continued. “What the oyster growers have worked on for years is to keep things like fecal coliform levels at a minimum.

“Yes, it’s ugly but it isn’t that harmful. Fecal matter is organic — it gets used up. It becomes a nutrient. It’s just an indication that there are people too close to or in the bay.

“But things that are really harmful are those hard core materials, heavy metals and chemicals like PCBs [polychlorinated biphenyls or manmade hydrocarbons], stuff that gets stored in the sediment from industrial processes.”

Geologic time

“Even when the South Bend/Raymond area had a much larger population logging and building ships — there were around a dozen mills, numerous whore houses and taverns, it was a big ‘urban’ area for its times, a real point of commerce,” Wilson said.

“But even then, the oysters did fine and no one got sick because there was never a pulp mill, never big industrial waste going into the bay. So we have a relatively clean sediment on the bay bottom today, “he concluded.

Willapa Bay is an estuary, big and shallow. The bay floor is made of layers of sedimentary materials, some newly deposited by the tides or river run-offs and some thousands of years old. This sedimentary layer is in constant motion and in differing states of erosion and deposition while it moves toward the ocean.

When Wilson scans the bay, he sees not only what everyone sees but he is able to look back in time — not decades but even further back into what scientists call “geologic time.”

“We can go back to the geologic history of the bay, say 60 million years,” he said, setting the scene. “There was no Coastal Range, no Cascades, no Rocky Mountains.”

During the Eocene, 60 million years ago, sediments and volcanic material were being deposited into a wide subsiding trough stretching from the Olympics on the north to the Klamath mountains to the south.

“Temperatures were warmer — it was a tropical marine area with swamps to the east to the margin of the Cascades of today. The coal areas in Centralia were formed during this period. I don’t know exactly what to compare it to,” said Wilson. “Maybe Puerto Rico or another archipelago region.”

“Sediments accumulated into this sinking basin, eventually reaching around 10,000 feet — a similar subsidence is happening today in the Gulf of Mexico. Eventually, some tens of millions of years ago, the crust began to rebound and those older sediments uplifted forming the Cascade Range and the Willapa Hills.”

The Cascades, which are still forming, are much more recent in time.

The ‘ugly’ rock of Cape D

Those early accumulations of volcanic materials and sediments, often called volcaniclastics, comprise the Willapa Hills.

“They’re ugly igneous rocks, but from their weathering over time nutrients are sloughed off — magnesium, calcium, iron and silica. The weathering of these silicate rocks contribute important mineral for the shells of an algae called diatoms that make up a valuable base of the food chain.

“Sediments store stuff,” said Wilson. “They move around and encapsulate nutrients and keep them from washing into the ocean. They can be released into the water column by disturbance such as burrowing critters in the bay.”

There are so many propitious factors that came together to form our bay. The older igneous rock that one sees on the Washington side of the Megler-Astoria Bridge also makes up part of Cape Disappointment. This rock, once buried thousands of feet below the current sea level, was included in that uplift that formed other Pacific Northwest peaks.

Wilson explained. “So here you have the Columbia River bringing down all this sand as it cuts through the gorge and it meets the wave energy at sea level and the sand which does not make it to deep water moves north. The hard rock of Cape Disappointment forms a shelter for the sediment, and, over time, the spit of the Long Beach Peninsula was created.

“The Peninsula locked in the waters of Willapa Bay to form the estuary,” he said. “If it weren’t for Cape D, we wouldn’t have a spit or a bay.”

The Pacific Aquaculture Caucus is organizing the first-ever U.S. workshop to explore Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture on September 14–15, 2010, at Peninsula College in Port Angeles, Washington. Also known as IMTA, this evolving approach to seafood production emphasizes an ecosystem management approach where ‘fed’ species, such as finfish or shrimp, are farmed in close proximity to species that can ‘extract’ nutrients from the water column, such as shellfish and seaweed. The workshop will highlight findings from IMTA pilot projects in Kyuquot Sound, on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, B.C.; Hood Canal, Washington; San Antonio, Texas; and Sanggou Bay, China. The goal of the workshop is an improved understanding of IMTA by U.S. aquaculturists, academics, researchers, and environmental organizations. The workshop is limited to the first 150 registrants. The fee for the workshop is $25. For more information and registration: http://www.pacaqua.org/PacAqua_News/2010/08/imta-workshop-registration

PORT TOWNSEND– The state Department of Health has reopened Port Townsend Bay to recreational shellfish harvesting, after test results collected last week showed no high levels of biotoxins.

Along with the bay, Admiralty Inlet, Mystery Bay and Kilisut Harbor is safe for the harvesting of all shellfish species except for butter clams.

The beaches were reopened after there are no toxins detectable for a one-month period.

Closures remain in effect for Discovery Bay, Mats Mats Bay and Port Ludlow.

Those considered safe are clams (including geoduck), oysters, mussels and other mollusks such as moon snails.

Crab meat is not known to contain toxins, but crabs should be cleaned with the guts removed before eating.

On July 13 the state closed Discovery Bay, Port Ludlow, Mats Mats Bay, Kilisut Harbor, Mystery Bay and Admiralty Inlet after toxin levels of 154 micrograms were detected earlier this week in a mussel sample at Fort Flagler.

The following day closures of Fort Flagler, Old Fort Townsend, Chimacum Beach and beaches in Port Townsend and Port Hadlock were imposed.

High levels of paralytic shellfish poisoning, or PSP, prompted closures of beaches on the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Neah Bay to Discovery Bay — including a commercial tract near Jamestown — in mid-June.

Symptoms of paralytic shellfish poisoning can appear within minutes or hours and usually begin with tingling lips and tongue, with the tingling moving to the hands and feet followed by difficulty breathing and potentially death.

Any one experiencing these symptoms should contact a health-care provider. For extreme reactions, dial 9–1-1.

Recreational shellfish harvesters should check the state Health Department website at www.doh.wa.gov/ehp/sf/biotoxin.htm or phone the Health Department’s biotoxin hot line at 800–562-5632 before harvesting shellfish anywhere in the state.

Bay scallops have spawned with a vengeance this summer in Cape Pogue Pond. Once ranked among the most productive ponds for scallop landings in the state, Cape Pogue is teeming with juvenile bay scallops, many about the size of a dime.

Juvenile scallops galore this year.

It takes 18 months for a bay scallop to reach harvestable size, which means if these juvenile scallops survive the coming winter, predation and other environmental factors, the fall of 2011 will be a banner year for scalloping.

The news of a huge set of bay scallops follows the news earlier this summer of an enormous set of baby oysters in the Tisbury Great Pond.

“I think it is fantastic. We are tickled pink,” said Cooper A. Gilkes 3rd, chairman of the Edgartown shellfish committee, adding: “It means next year will be like Christmas.”

On Saturday, deputy shellfish constable Warren Gaines took the town power boat into Cape Pogue to have a close look at the scallop set. He dropped a scallop drag off Shear Pen pond, a secluded cove in the eastern end of the saltwater bay. After a 30-second tow, Mr. Gaines pulled the drag out of the water and dumped the contents onto a bare culling board. It was easy to see what shellfish department employees have been talking about for days: the drag was full of tiny bay scallops.

At 1,400 acres, Cape Pogue Pond is one of the largest of ponds on the Island, and Mr. Gaines believes the pond bottom is a blanket of seed. Wherever he drops a drag, he comes up with more of the same: over 100 bay scallops in each tow.

Deputy Constable Warren Gaines is finding loads of scallops at Cape Pogue.

Deputy Constable Warren Gaines is finding loads of scallops at Cape Pogue.

Mr. Gaines believes the spawning event probably happened over a period of days during the last two weeks of June and in early July. Scallops spawn when the water temperature warms; after that, wind and weather affect where the larvae settle.

But it is too early for big predictions; much can happen between now and the fall of 2011. Mr. Gaines said the shellfish department, with help from the shellfishermen, hopes to take steps to husband the young scallops and help their chances for survival. Already the northeast storm that lashed the Island yesterday created a hazard; wind-driven tides can throw the scallops onto the shore, fatally stranding them.

“It will be key for us to get those that are in shallow water, before they wash ashore,” Mr. Gaines said. The shellfish department plans to tow for the juvenile scallops and then take them out to deeper water. Some may be taken into Sengekontacket in an effort to boost the bay scallop population in that pond.

Clyde MacKenzie, a shellfish biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service in New Jersey, has been making regular trips to Cape Pogue this summer. The 79-year-old Edgartown native has done considerable work and study over the years on bay scallops. Recalling when Cape Pogue was far more productive decades ago, he said: “It looks like it will be a spectacular season next year. I’ve never seen the seed so abundant.”

But Edgartown shellfish constable Paul Bagnall sounded a more conservative note. “Having the pond full of seed is step one. I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but it is still early to tell what the fishing will be like next year,” Mr. Bagnall said.

He noted that Cape Pogue Pond had a productive season last winter because of a good set of seed two years ago. This past winter the season was extended for three weeks past the traditional March 31 closure.

In this July 1, 2010 picture, Louisiana State University assistant research professor John Supan holds an oyster shell containing oyster larvae, seen as black dots, in his bivalve hatchery at the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Laboratory in Grand Isle, La. Unlike traditional oysters that spawn and get skinny in the summer, Supan has developed sterile, “super” crossbreeds that remain fat, making them one of the best hopes for restoring Louisiana’s oyster industry. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

GRAND ISLE, La. — Biologist John Supan thinks he has developed what may be the holy grail for oyster lovers: a hardy breed of the delectable shellfish that stays fat enough for consumers to eat throughout the year.

And unlike many oysters across the Gulf Coast, ruined by BP’s massive oil spill and the fresh water poured in to fight it, Supan’s oysters are all alive.

Now, nearly four months after the spill, Supan’s oysters may offer the Gulf oyster industry a chance for a better long-term recovery. But his special breed of modified oysters, which some say are prohibitively expensive, could be a hard sell to an industry reeling from the BP disaster.

Most oystermen agree that few oysters will be harvested from the Gulf Coast in the next year or two, signaling a potential calamity for shucking houses, oyster farmers and people who love a half dozen oysters on the half shell. As much as 65 percent of the nation’s oysters come from the Gulf.

Oysters are particularly susceptible to pollution, taking longer than fish or shrimp to clear oil contamination from their bodies.

Supan’s oysters are bred for performance, making them more fit to deal with viruses and other contaminants. Being sterile, they don’t go through the stress of reproduction, so they stay fat and juicy all year round. Supan says his oysters are sweet, plump and meaty in summertime when other oysters become thin and watery.

But the most crucial advantage this year was their mobility.

Unlike the vast majority of oysters in the Gulf, which spend their lives on the bottoms of bays and sounds, Supan’s oysters dangle in the water in cages at a hatchery on the inland side of this island.

When the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20 just a few dozen miles from his hatchery, the 57-year-old Louisiana State University oyster biologist evacuated his broods to a research hatchery in Alabama and a wildlife preserve in western Louisiana. Then he brought them back.

“In my opinion, this is the most important brood of oysters in the history of the Gulf of Mexico,” Supan says. “But you know, you ask an oysterman that and they will say, ‘Huh?’”

He said the day is coming when all the Gulf’s oystermen will know what he’s talking about.

For three decades, Supan has been developing new oysters by mixing up their chromosomes in a process known as triploid production. He breeds a rare oyster that has extra chromosomes with a normal oyster and produces a sterile hybrid. The process is common on the East and West coasts but still untried in the Gulf, besides Supan’s batch.

“I don’t know if it’s the future with a capital ‘THE,’ but it’s very important,” said Bill Walton, an Auburn University shellfish biologist. “It can give you a faster growing oyster. It cuts down production time and it does seem to solve the problem of ‘water bellies’ in the summer when oysters spawn and you have a tired, thin oyster.”

“For the long-term viability of oysters in Louisiana what (the hatchery) is doing is the kind of pioneer work,” said Mike Voisin, an oyster processor and leader in the Louisiana oyster industry.

The industry in Louisiana faces daunting threats from the oil pollution, oyster diseases and pressure from state and federal officials who want to reclaim lost marshland by opening up the Mississippi River even more often. If that happens, traditional oyster grounds could be ruined in many of the inland bays where they are grown today.

Helen Skansi, a 75-year-old Plaquemines Parish oyster company owner with more than 1,000 leased acres, is painfully aware of the problems.

“Things will never be the same with the bedding grounds they had before with the oil,” she said.

Kenneth Fox, who leases 15,000 acres of state waters to grow his oysters, is equally concerned.

“I lost 95 percent of my leases with this oil spill,” he said. “Everything is dead on the west side of the river.”

Asked about Supan’s super oysters, however, he was unconvinced.

“I think the research is great, and I think what he’s doing is going to be a big help. But that is going to be a costly process.”

Supan would like to see his special oyster larvae distributed through hatcheries across the Gulf to oyster growers. He said he could start distributing the larvae now.

But a lot has to happen for that to materialize. Ideally, the sterile oysters would be grown in cages in special areas designated as marine farms. And a host of permitting and zoning issues would have to be resolved.

Growing oysters the way Supan does is tricky. They are raised in structures propped up off the water bottom. That requires new harvesting equipment. Oystermen currently use mechanical devices like plows to scour their catch from the Gulf floor. It also would require new permits.

It takes about two years for an oyster to grow to market size.

Once the special summer oysters grow to adult size, then the oyster growers would have to find buyers. Typically, a dozen oysters cost about $12 at an oyster bar on the Gulf Coast. Supan said a cost analysis has not been done to figure out how much the summer oysters would cost. He says the market would take care of that.

“That’s a big investment on a gamble,” Fox said of Supan’s experiments. “I’m not saying it won’t happen one day, but the way Louisiana is set up, it’s going to be hard to make happen. Half the people in the industry would have to get out of the business for the other half to make a profit.”

Still, some institutions that fund research are persuaded that Supan’s technique holds promise.

Supan’s research has been backed by federal and state grants over his 30-year career. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently awarded Supan and other researchers a $250,000 grant to develop more hatchery technology.

Inside his algae room, Supan looks like a winemaker as he surveys tanks of algae he feeds to his oysters. The bacteria grows under fluorescent light.

“It takes a wet green thumb to grow algae,” he said. “You got to be patient with it. It’s very intuitive. Just like growing a garden. Some people say they talk to their house plants; well, my algae and myself have conversations all the time.”

Supan has big plans.

He hopes the state will build an oyster dock where he can teach oyster farmers to grow oysters in saltier Gulf farms similar to his, where the oysters are reared to market size on platforms that thwart predators such as snails and bottom-feeding fish.

“With all these calamities — the hurricanes and the oil spill — we’re five years behind schedule,” he said.

Louisiana Sea Grant Bivalve Hatchery

I know many of you have been having a strong season, and I would ask you to consider sharing some of that bounty with shellfishermen from the Gulf whose livelihoods have been destroyed by the oilspill.  The national attention is no longer riveted to the images of oil gushing, but the damage will continue for months or years and scientists estimate that 70–80% of the spilled oil remains in the Gulf.  It may be years before some of these beds recover.

Many fishermen have not been able to file claims — either because they don’t have proper records or cannot fill out the appropriate forms.  We have posted a link to Friends of the Fishermen, a charity run by colleagues in the Gulf that was initially set up to help those impacted by Katrina.   If you note Tribute to :“ECSGA” they will see to it that donations go to oystering families, shuckers and others who are in need help.

They have a good track record and do a good job.  We will also be fundraising for this group at the Milford Festival this weekend.

Best

Bob Rheault

Picture by John Logan

Provincetown, Mass.

CHINCOTEAGUE, Moonstone, Bayou La Batre, Blue Point, Wellfleet, Malpeque … this was what I knew of the sea as a child: the list of oysters on the menu board at Grand Central Terminal’s Oyster Bar. My father used to take my sister, Laura, and me there after our parents divorced.

I had never been close to my father and was shy during these meals. At the Oyster Bar, we didn’t have to face each other; we could sit side by side on barstools watching the waiters in their white aprons as they opened oyster after oyster, each with one deft flick of the wrist. These men had dignity and composure such as I’d never seen. They were giving a performance as much as preparing meals. We could watch, sip our oyster stew and count ourselves as having accomplished another visit.

The names of the oysters stayed with me — each one representing a distant, mysterious seaside community, where fogs settled over serpentine estuaries and men repaired their fishing nets around lantern-lighted tables at night. I felt that somewhere far outside the city (Pemaquid? Apalachicola?) there existed a briny, muscular life that had more meaning than mine, if only because it was aligned with the tides. I wanted to grow up and become part of a place like that.

Laura, two years younger than I and my exact opposite (she held the leg-wrestling championship at her local fire department the year I published my first short story), shared my fascination. I don’t think either of us understood how oysters grew or were gathered or anything really except that, as the poet Léon-Paul Fargue said, eating one is “like kissing the sea on the lips.” But we both gravitated coastward.

I went to Cape Cod, where I found Wellfleet much as I’d imagined it, with the same narrow streets angling down to the harbor, and fishermen idling their motors so as to leave no wake, preserving the delicate world beneath. I first kissed the man who would become my husband on the end of the wharf here in Provincetown. Our daughter is 16 now and a full-fledged local. When she was 3 she looked into an empty swimming pool and pronounced, “Low tide.”

Laura moved to Cedar Key, an island off northwest Florida. The Suwannee River empties into the Gulf of Mexico there, and the mix of fresh– and saltwater is perfect for shellfish. While Wellfleet oysters are mostly farmed from tiny seeds set on racks in the intertidal zone at the edges of the bays, many gulf oysters still grow in reefs, and fishermen go out in flat-bottomed boats to pry them loose with 16-foot-long tongs. Nearly 70 percent of the oysters eaten in the United States come from these waters.

Laura and her husband, Jerry, now run a shellfish farm, in addition to tonging oysters and operating the fish market in town. Laura’s son has followed them into the business. They live in a house along the water and there’s an egret that comes to eat scraps from their picnic table.

Jerry plays the dobro in a blues band, and the first thing we do when we visit is get a big bottle of wine and go out to listen. Jerry’s family has been oystering for generations, and he’s made a living at it since his father died when he was 14. He and his brothers sold oysters on the half shell back then. Each one had his own refrigerator stocked full of oysters, and they shucked for people who lined up to buy.

It has always been said that if a man had a small boat and a set of oyster tongs, he could feed his family until the hard times passed. During the Great Depression, Cedar Key lived off its seafood. And when the current economic downturn hit and the tourists dwindled, people again fell back on those old ways of earning a living. But now, with the oil spill following the recession, Cedar Key locals are finding they can no longer depend on the water’s abundance to get them through.

Oyster reefs filter water, keeping it pure and fresh — the slightest change in the water changes the oyster (that’s why there are so many kinds, each tasting of its own bay). Gulf oysters are filling with oil instead of saltwater now, and dying reef by reef. Laura and Jerry don’t think there’s any hope for their farm, and worry for the fate of their entire island.

Though BP’s faulty well seems to have finally stopped gushing, the millions of barrels of spilled oil will pollute the gulf for a long time to come, and every change of the wind and current will pose a grave new threat to Cedar Key. Hopeful estimates suggest that within 10 to 20 years the oyster reefs in the gulf may rebound. But the way of life, its mystery and also reliability, the sense that a man has what he needs for his family there within his reach, will be gone.

I’ve been trying to persuade Laura and Jerry to move north. It’s true that even here, beyond the reach of the oil, oystering is tedious, heavy work. You have to wait for the low tides of the full and new moon to cull and harvest the oysters, all the while protecting them as best you can from their natural enemies: wind and weather, disease and predators like moon snails, whose tongues drill holes as perfect as a paper punch through shells so as to suck out the meat. And when winter comes, you pull the oysters — literally tons of them — out of the water and store them dormant in root cellars so they won’t freeze into the ice and wash out to sea with it in the spring.

But when you’re out on the water and the baby bluefish are jumping and the sea is like a bolt of silk changing color under the sunset, you can feel that ancient, vital connection to the earth that lives in dreams and metaphors, and catches the imagination of children. It gives us hope and strength in ways we barely recognize but on which we’ve always relied.

The project team jointly set up by Zhang and Guo Ximing, of the State University of New Jersey more than two years ago, found the oyster genome comprised 800 million DNA base pairs, including around 20,000 genes.

“This finding has proved the extremely high genetic diversity in low forms of marine life and is of great value to oyster breeding,” Zhang told Xinhua Tuesday.

More than 100 varieties of the mollusk are known to exist in coastal areas around all the continents except the Polar regions. The oyster breeding industry is estimated to be worth $3.5 billion a year. About a quarter of China’s marine aquaculture output is generated by oysters.

Li Naisheng, vice-director of Shandong Province Department of Science and Technology, said oyster breeding had long struggled with a low yield-to-area ratio. “Although oysters have high fertility, their offspring are very vulnerable and can die soon after birth.”

Li said the genome sequencing map would help scientists breed faster-growing oysters with a higher survival rate.

Zhang Guofan said further study of the oyster genome sequencing map might allow scientists to change its more troublesome habits.

“The oyster is a typical marine fouling organism. They love to stick to the surfaces of ships, increasing resistance, and they block pipes in water and thus hinder marine operations,” said Zhang.

“However, by searching for the key gene crucial to such a trait, scientists might be able to entice them to grow independently,” said Zhang.

Scientists were also looking at isolating the gene responsible for the oyster’s super viscocity for industrial applications.

Zhang said the development of such a material was only at the theoretical stage, but it could be applied in construction, craft production and machinery maintenance.

Ni Peixiang, director of the Shenzhen Huada Genomics Institute, a partner in the oyster genome sequencing project, said the sequencing was “a basic but significant step” and further study would be made on individual genes.

Zhang Guofan said he was dedicated to solving some of the riddles surround the mollusk.

“Why do most oyster offspring die shortly after birth? How come no two oysters look exactly the same? Why is it believed that eating oysters is good for the kidneys? Answers will come from this map,” he said.

The world’s first human genome sequence map was finished in June 2000. From 2000 to 2009, scientists across the world have drawn whole genome sequence maps for 1,100 species, averaging 118 a year.

Chinese scientists have completed genome sequencing for rice, domesticated silkworms and chickens, as well as endangered animals like the giant panda and Tibetan antelope.

Louisiana produces a third of the oysters consumed in the United States, more than any other state. In one of the most productive bays, more than 60 percent of oysters were found dead. A few weeks ago, a die-off occurred so quickly, oyster meat covered the surface of the water.

“It looked like a fish kill,” said Patrick Banks, a biologist at the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. The kill occurred “so fast and was so large that the predators that normally would eat up the oyster meat just couldn’t keep up,” he said.

Oysters are very simple and sensitive water filterers. When the fresh water was released, it flushed the salty ocean water out of the marshes, making it difficult for oysters to survive, scientists said.

The fresh-water flushing is one of several Gulf oil spill responses that scientists are worried may do more harm than good. Louisiana and federal officials have also debated if large sand berms built to block incoming oil will actually intensify erosion.

A spokesman for the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority agreed the freshwater release reduced salinity of the oyster beds, but rain and natural river flow also contributed to the oyster deaths. State officials are “currently evaluating all of the adverse effects associated with the oil spill” and that BP PLC “is expected to pay” for all spill-related damage, said Garret Graves, the authority’s chairman in a written statement (Jeffrey Ball, Wall Street Journal, July 20). – LP

Munday, P. L., Dixson, D. L., McCormick, M. I., Meekan, M., Ferrari, M. C. O., & Chivers, D. P., 2010. Replenishment of fish populations is threatened by ocean acidification.

Carrie Byron, a doctoral student in the URI Department of Fisheries, Animal and Veterinary Science, examined the ecological carrying capacity of the waters that currently contain leases for oyster aquaculture in the state, including Narragansett Bay and five South County salt ponds.

‘The farms are part of a greater ecosystem, and we want to make sure the whole system remains healthy,’ said Byron, a native of Mansfield, Mass. ‘The affect of the oysters doesn’t stop at the farm boundary — it extends from the bacteria in the system to the birds and the top predatory fish. We identified all those key species that are active players in the system.’

What she found was that Narragansett Bay could support the growth of 1.3 tons of oysters per acre, whereas just .002 tons of oysters per acre are currently being harvested from these waters. The carrying capacity of the salt ponds is 3.2 tons per acre, and farmers now harvest about .05 tons per acre.

At present farming density rates, this means that nine percent of the surface area of Narragansett Bay and 46 percent of the surface of the salt ponds could be leased for oyster aquaculture before the waters would suffer adverse effects. Less than two percent of these waters are being used for aquaculture today. State aquaculture regulations indicate that no more than five percent of the surface waters of the salt ponds can be leased for aquaculture.

‘I was expecting to be surprised by my results, but it was still surprising,’ Byron said. ‘I knew there was a lot of food out there for oysters, but I didn’t know there was that much.’

The major difference between the carrying capacity of the Bay and the salt ponds is due to the quantity of zooplankton in the waters.

‘Zooplankton in the Bay are very heavy grazers on the same food the oysters eat, so there is competition for that food,’ Byron said. ‘Zooplankton come into the Bay from the ocean, and they are not coming into the ponds nearly as much, so there is less competition for food in the ponds.’

Byron noted that Rhode Island’s aquaculture industry, while small compared to other parts of the world, has great potential for continued growth due to the abundance of microscopic organisms upon which the oysters feed.

By comparison, she said that the carrying capacity of oyster aquaculture in New Zealand, which has a very large aquaculture industry, is just 0.3 tons per acre, far below the 1.3 and 3.2 tons per acre in Rhode Island waters. According to a study published five years ago, New Zealand farmers harvest oysters at a rate of 0.1 tons per acre, about double the rate as in Rhode Island.

Byron’s study is the result of concerns expressed over the high rate of growth of the aquaculture industry in Rhode Island. An aquaculture working group convened by the R.I. Coastal Resources Management Council requested the study to enable the group to make recommendations about how best to manage the industry’s growth.

Byron said that there are other issues besides the ecological carrying capacity that regulators must address when determining the future of the industry, including conflicts with other users of state waters, but her study is an important first step.

‘This is likely the most detailed scientific determination to date of ecological carrying capacities for shellfish aquaculture for a large estuary and coastal lagoons anywhere in the world,’ said Barry Costa-Pierce, director of Rhode Island Sea Grant and Byron’s advisor. ‘Carrie has completed not only a massive exercise in data mining and modelling, but also translated these findings to a very engaged, statewide group of stakeholders. Her results will impact shellfish aquaculture developments locally and globally.’

Source: University of Rhode Island

BENEATH a floating dock off Governors Island, tucked behind the squat octagonal white ventilation tower for the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, there are oysters growing in New York Harbor.

And not just any oysters. These little bivalves, 500,000 strong, make up the largest concentrated oyster population that the harbor has seen in perhaps a century.

On a recent spring day, Pete Malinowski, who tends to these oysters, removed one of the metal grates that have been fitted into the dock’s surface, revealing a series of silos, as he calls the 60-gallon plastic tubs in which his charges live. He plunged his hand into a silo and pulled up a few specimens for examination. They were small, maybe an inch and a quarter long, but they looked like normal oysters: ridged, craggy and tightly shut — not the grotesque mutant mollusks that the words “cultivated in New York City waters” might suggest.

“I was skeptical about their rate of survival because they all came in at two millimeters, when they’re pretty vulnerable,” Mr. Malinowski said. “But look at this, the papery-thin part.” He pointed to the outer rim of a shell, thin and translucent like the tip of a fingernail. “That’s new growth, which is awesome.”

Mr. Malinowski, 27, is a second-generation oysterman whose parents, Sarah and Steve, run the Fishers Island Oyster Farm in Block Island Sound. If you’ve ordered oysters in a New York City restaurant, chances are you’ve eaten ones from Fishers Island, whose longtime champions include the chefs David Bouley, Michael Lomonaco and Alfred Portale.

But Mr. Malinowski is not farming oysters for commercial purposes, and the person to whom he reported this growth data was not some leathery old sea dog in a woolen cap but a fresh-faced 17-year-old from Canarsie, Brooklyn, named Jeptha Sullivan.

Mr. Malinowski is an aquaculture teacher at the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School, a part of the city’s public school system. Mr. Sullivan just completed his senior year there with the distinction of having been named the school’s most experienced diver.

To see these young men working together is to witness the confluence of two extraordinary narratives: that of the Harbor School, 85 percent of whose students come from families living below the poverty line; and that of the New York Harbor oyster, the briny, bountiful staple that gave the city much of its flavor, literally and figuratively, until it was done in by overharvesting and pollution.

Last Friday was graduation day for Mr. Sullivan and his 60 or so classmates. Their commencement ceremony was the first official event held at the Harbor School’s striking new campus on Governors Island. Until now, the school, which opened in 2003, had been in the landlocked neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn.

The school’s new home, where classes will begin in September, is in a location that befits its name: on the harbor in a large, handsome brick building on the west side of the island that used to be a Coast Guard hospital. There are views of the Statue of Liberty across the Upper Bay.

The building, with a 432-student capacity, has been retrofitted with state-of-the-art facilities, including a fin-fish and shellfish production lab, a large room dominated by a Wonka-esque network of tubing and tanks in which scallops, mussels, clams, horseshoe crabs and blackfish, among other indigenous harbor species, will be cultivated.

There is also a marine-tech wood shop where students will build 21-foot sloops, and there will soon be an organic garden and an aquaponic freshwater system for farming tilapia; that is, for raising the fish symbiotically with plants.

In keeping with the school’s overall green ethos, students and faculty members will eat together in the expansive dining hall using washable, reusable plates and trays and metal cutlery. The school secured an industrial dishwasher, a rarity in the city school system. Harbor School students do not pay for their meals, in accordance with federal policy, since 70 percent or more of the student body qualifies for free lunch.

If the aquaponic system works to Mr. Malinowski’s expectations, the students will dine on tilapia and tomatoes they will have raised themselves. (The lab’s saltwater species will be raised strictly for educational and habitat-restoration purposes.)

But the oyster is the Harbor School’s calling card, the symbol of its goals. Every incoming freshman, as if pledging a fraternity, must swallow one — though it must be noted that these initiation oysters come from Mr. Malinowski’s parents’ place 100 miles away. Eating a New York Harbor oyster is forbidden and potentially illness-inducing. Which is both sad and the whole point.

On Governors Island last month, a group of seniors was helping Mr. Malinowski install a series of tanks and pumps at the end of Lima Pier, which juts off the island’s southern tip. This is one of two off-campus sites — the other being the eco-dock, as the floating dock is called — where oysters (their seed also donated by the Malinowskis) are being raised in harbor water.

“Here I am, talking about salinity, turbidity and nitrates,” said Janique Moore, 18, who lives in the Starrett City apartment complex (now known as Spring Creek Towers) in East New York, Brooklyn, and is contemplating becoming an environmental lawyer or a marine biologist. “But I’ll admit that when I was little, I didn’t think there were animals living in these waters. I didn’t even think of New York as a harbor-y kind of city.”

Three hundred years ago, the lower Hudson River estuary was home to 350 square miles of thriving oyster beds, their harvest enjoyed by Native Americans and European settlers alike. Right up until the end of the 19th century, lower Manhattan was rife with inexpensive oyster cellars where a nickel or two bought you dozens of oysters, raw, stewed or fried.

But greed and carelessness proved to be the urban oyster’s undoing. Dredging and raw sewage in the 19th century and industrial pollution in the 20th destroyed its natural habitat. The few wild oysters that survive in New York Harbor are inedible.

Enter Murray Fisher, 35, the program director of the Harbor School. Raised on an organic cattle farm outside Richmond, Va., Mr. Fisher spent much of his childhood outdoors, a preservationist ethic ingrained into his being at an early age.

In 1998, fresh out of Vanderbilt University, he went to work for Riverkeeper, the environmental organization devoted to protecting the Hudson. It was there that he had the idea for a city school devoted, as he put it in an interview, “to a curriculum that’s restoration-based and makes kids feel that they’re valuable contributing members of society.”

“At the very least,” Mr. Fisher said, “it would give them a relationship with a marine environment, which hardly anyone has in New York City.”

Oysters would be central to this curriculum, and not just for historical reasons. In a healthy marine ecosystem, oysters are a keystone species. As they spawn and multiply, they form beds that expand into reefs, and these reefs in turn become hospitable habitats for all manner of marine life: crabs, fish, ribbony eelgrass.

What’s more, each oyster is a natural water-filtration system, pumping between 20 and 50 gallons of seawater through its gills each day and extracting algae and phytoplankton for its food.

Despite his inexperience, Mr. Fisher, through innate political savvy and sheer bullheadedness, willed the Harbor School into existence. Crucially, he forged an alliance with the Urban Assembly, a nonprofit organization that has created 22 small, theme-based public schools in low-income areas that are otherwise served by large, underperforming city schools.

Mr. Fisher said he hoped that the Governors Island oysters would ultimately be the Adams and Eves of a marine-life renaissance in the harbor. If multiple oyster reefs are successfully established throughout the Hudson River estuary — a long-range goal the Harbor School is trying to realize in partnership with NY/NJ Baykeeper, a partner organization of Riverkeeper — the environmental impact could be significant.

Already, an experiment very much like this is under way, conducted by Bart Chezar, 63, a former engineer for the New York Power Authority who has spent his retirement establishing his own oyster colony (with the city’s and state’s permission) in the Bay Ridge Flats, a large area of shallow water off the coast of Red Hook, Brooklyn.

In May, several Harbor School students joined Mr. Chezar at the site, helping lay down 500 oyster shells with live oyster spat attached. (Spat are immature oysters that have ended their free-swimming larval phase and have attached permanently to something.) The shells were fastened with plastic loops to two-foot-square grids that had been fashioned from PVC pipes filled with sand to weigh them down. These grids were then placed on a bed of empty Fishers Island oyster shells.

Several weeks later, Mr. Sullivan dove into the murky waters of the Bay Ridge Flats and emerged holding up one of the grids for examination. The progress was promising: the spat, which in May looked like mere dots, had already grown into recognizable oysters: tiny, but with little hinged shells.

Back on the shore, he considered his own progress.

“I never even knew how to swim until a few years ago,” he said. “I had a near-drowning incident when I was around 10. But since my sophomore year I’ve been a certified Open Water Diver, which my mother likes to tell everybody,” he said, smiling sheepishly.

Mr. Sullivan lives with his mother, who makes ends meet as a baby sitter; his father is currently unemployed. This fall, he will attend Hobart College in Geneva, N.Y., where he plans to major in environmental studies.

“What’s great about this experience is that it gives a kid so many clear career pathways that he might otherwise not be exposed to,” Mr. Fisher said. “The oyster thing alone, it’s not just about oysters. It’s about policy, technology, permits, aquaculture. We need people to become scuba divers, boat drivers, photographers, scientists, lawyers, lawmakers, marine-policy experts.”

The Harbor School program, like the seafaring life, is physically demanding. Merely commuting to the school from eastern Brooklyn — first by subway to the South Ferry station in lower Manhattan, and then by ferry, followed by a brisk cross-island walk to the campus —will be a taxing task in the dark, wind-whipped mornings of winter.

“We tell the students there’s no bad weather, only bad clothing,” said Jennifer Ostrow, the school’s assistant principal.

With the water warming up, the mature oysters in the eco-dock will soon be spawning. Still, the persistent presence of heavy metals and PCB’s in the harbor will probably preclude the school’s students from eating city-bred oysters within their lifetimes.

But it’s not inconceivable that one day, a child of Jeptha Sullivan will be able to sit down at the counter of the Grand Central Oyster Bar and order a half-dozen Bay Ridges, a half-dozen Staten Islands and maybe a couple of TriBeCas.