Oysters from Aquaculture

choi

(1) Clay Risen, Jules Melancon, Oyster Farmer Who Changed Industry, Dies at65. New York Times, Sept 18, 2023, at page B5
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/17/us/jules-melancon-dead.html

photo caption: Mr Melancon at a restaurant in Lafitte, LA in 2021. He trucked his oysters directly and shipped them as far as Seattle.

My comment: This obituary is like negative painting. Of course, this farmer did not contribute much. It was scientists who di, and taught the farmer how to improve. The photo caption said that this farmer drove across states to transport the oysters he farmed.

----------------------------------BYT
Jules Melancon, a third-generation Louisiana oysterman who, rather than giving up after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill ravaged the Gulf Coast, found an innovative, sustainable and much tastier way to bring his briny delicacies to New Orleans restaurants, died on Aug. 31 at his home in Cut Off, La. He was 65.

His father, Loyman Melancon, said the cause was metastatic cancer.

Mr. Melancon spent most of his life farming oysters the old-fashioned way, working a dredge across the bottom of the shallow, brackish waters of the lower Mississippi River Delta. He captained his own 65-foot steel-bottom boat, My Melanie, named for his wife, and returned every evening sagging under the weight of the day’s catch.

It was backbreaking work. In his prime, the ursine Mr. Melancon would lug two 120-pound sacks of oysters onto a truck. But it was lucrative, too: He’d sell 400 of those bags in a day, at up to $15 a bag, to canneries and wholesalers that shipped worldwide.

The good days didn’t last. By the end of the 1990s, rising sea levels, pollution and erosion were driving down the oyster population and making the fragile region vulnerable to storm damage.

“We started feeling it before Katrina, that the oysters were on the downhill,” Mr. Melancon told The Morning News, an online magazine, in 2015. “And then after Katrina, it kind of phased out the oysters, about two-thirds of them, and then in 2008 the oysters started coming back strong, and then we had the BP spill.”

That oil spill, from the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, coated the Louisiana coast in millions of gallons of crude.

Still young enough to find a new job on land, Mr. Melancon was on the brink of quitting when a friend, Jim Gossen, who owned one of the Gulf Coast’s biggest seafood wholesalers, told him about a new type of oyster farming being tested by Auburn University researchers near Mobile, Ala.

Instead of dredging, farmers grew spats, or immature oysters, from pinhead-size seeds in drums on land. When the oysters were the size of a quarter, they went into chicken-wire cages suspended in shallow water.

Wild oysters might take five years to reach full size; with this new approach, exposing them to a rich flow of nutrients, they needed less than 10 months. And they were perfect: big and meaty, with photogenic shells that looked perfect on a raw bar.

“There’s a greater level of care and tending,” William Walton, who ran the Auburn program and is now at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences, said in a phone interview. “It’s more equivalent to a microbrew.”

In 2014, Mr. Melancon received Louisiana’s first alternative oyster culture license. Soon he was trucking the oysters directly to famed New Orleans restaurants like Brennan’s and Pêche.

They were a hit. In her book “Consider the Oyster” (1941), the food writer M.F.K. Fisher wrote that “American oysters differ as much as American people.” But that wasn’t really the case on the gulf: While oyster fans are used to hyperlocal varieties from the East Coast like Damariscottas and Wellfleets, those from the gulf had no such provenance, going by the generic name of Gulf Coast oysters and bound for soups, frying pans and cans.

Mr. Melancon changed all that. Suddenly he was offering names like Beauregard Islands, Champagnes and Queen Besses, pulled from different corners of his watery farming grounds, each with its own nuanced flavors.

“Jules was a pioneer,” the New Orleans restaurateur Dickie Brennan said.

Mr. Melancon did well financially, but only relatively. Despite the growing renown of his oysters — he shipped to restaurants as far away as Seattle — he was sometimes just scraping by, making a fraction of what he had made in the past. Hurricane Ida, in 2021, set him back, as did a serious back injury he sustained while trying to fix his storm-damaged roof.

Still, by taking a risk on a new twist on a centuries-old practice, Mr. Melancon showed his fellow oyster farmers that there could still be a future for their vanishing way of life. Today there are dozens of similar efforts across the coast, Dr. Walton said.

“When you meet somebody that tries to be the best at what they do, I don’t care if he’s a ditch digger,” Mr. Gossen said by phone. “There’s a certain aura about them when they want to be the best.”

Jules Chris Melancon was born on March 22, 1958, in Cut Off, a bayou community about 25 miles south of New Orleans. He grew up bilingual, speaking Cajun French at home, as part of a vibrant, tight-knit community that would rapidly fade over his lifetime.

Along with his father, he is survived by his mother, Mamie Lee (Aeymard), a homemaker; his wife, Melanie (St. Pierre) Melancon; and his sisters, Patti Barrios, Wendy Dodge, Tina O’Neal and Suzette Esbonge.

Mr. Melancon attended Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, La., and then transferred to Delgado Community College in New Orleans, but left before graduating.

While attending college he worked on his father’s oyster boat on the side, but he later decided to try something else. He went to work on a Shell oil rig in 1980, just as the domestic oil boom was beginning. He rose quickly; by 25 he was managing multiple rigs. But lax safety standards and constant exposure to toxic chemicals drove him back to the oyster boat.

In 1983 he worked with his father and uncles for a spell; when they retired, he took over the business.

The best part about oystering, he said in a 2015 oral history interview for Baylor University, was “about being free.” “When I go farming,” he said, “when I get up, to me, it used to be for the peace and tranquillity. In the morning, to see that sun rise — and I’d be out there early, farming my oysters.”

But then all that changed.

“Now everything is more polluted,” he said. “And the land’s not going to be the same, and it’s not going to get better.”

A correction was made on Sept. 17, 2023: An earlier version of this obituary misstated the name of the town in Louisiana where Mr. Melancon lived. It is Cut Off, not Cutoff.

choi

There is no need to read the rest (besides quotations) of any below -- except (3)(a), which is well written.
(2)
(a)
(i) Massachusetts Oyster Project, Inc is a nonprofit based in Wellesley (a Boston suburb), Mass.

Learn More About Oyster. Massachusetts Oyster Project, undated
https://massoyster.org/oyster-information
("Oyster is the name for a number of species of bivalves located around the world. In New England, our native species is the Eastern Oyster")
(ii) oyster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyster
("is the common name for a number of different families of salt-water bivalve molluscs that live in marine or brackish habitats; section 2 Types, section 2.1 True oysters: eastern oyster [click it and the new page says about the eastern oyster: "Crassostrea virginica ranges from northern New Brunswick south through parts of the West Indies[4] to Venezuela" including Alabama.
(iii) Habitat Focus: Oyster Reefs. Alabama Center for Ecological Resilience (ACER), Feb 24, 2016
http://acer.disl.org/news/2016/02/24/habitat-focus-oyster-reefs/
("Oyster reefs are a historically common and important coastal ecosystem * * * The term oyster reef refers to an area in which clumps of oysters occur close together and in higher densities than in surrounding areas. The Gulf’s oyster, Crassostrea virginica, reproduces by releasing eggs and sperm into the water. Once sperm meet egg, and the egg begins to develop, a planktonic larva is formed. This free-swimming larval stage is carried by water currents and, usually within weeks, settles to the bottom. Although the exact cue for settlement is not known, larvae (known as spat ['origin unknown': merriam-webster.com] once they settle) prefer to settle on hard surfaces such as other oyster shells" thereby forming clump or cluster of oysters)
(iv) Astorga, Marcela P, Genetic Considerations for Mollusk Production in Aquaculture: Current State of Knowledge. Frontier in Genetics, 5: 435 (2014).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4261805/

Quote:

"In 2012, world mollusk production in aquaculture reached a volume of 15,171,000 tons, representing 23% of total aquaculture production and positioning mollusks as the second most important category of aquaculture products (fishes are the first). Clams and oysters are the mollusk species with the highest production levels, followed in descending order by mussels, scallops, and abalones.

"The analysis was applied to mollusks which are of importance for aquaculture, with emphasis on the 5 species with the highest production levels. According to FAO, these are: Japanese clam Ruditapes philippinarum [which distributes in China, Korea and the Philippines, among others, but not in Taiwan; 中国南方俗称花蛤，北方通称蛤蜊]; Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas; Chilean mussel Mytilus chilensis; Blood clam Anadara granosa [so named (blood) due to presence of (red) hemoglobin in tissue fluid: en.wikipedia.org] and Chinese clam Sinonovacula constricta [the last is found in China and Japan, but not in Taiwan].

"a large quantity of genetic research has been done in the oyster Crassostrea gigas" including DNA sequencing.


(b)
(i) production in the United States:
(A) Oyster. Agricultural Marketing Resource Center (AgMRC), Iowa State University, last updated in March 2022
https://www.agmrc.org/commoditie ... ish-species/oysters
("The United States produces two major species of oysters, Crassostrea virginica (the Atlantic oyster or Eastern oyster) and the non-native Crassostrea gigas (Pacific oyster). The Eastern oyster, found primarily in the Gulf of Mexico (Gulf Coast) region and the Chesapeake Bay region, historically accounts for roughly 75 percent of total US harvests. * * * According to FAO figures, in 1952 global oyster aquaculture production surpassed wild harvests for the first time – with 306,930 and 302,526 metric tons reported, respectively. Aquaculture production has consistently exceeded wild oyster harvests since that time, and in 2019 accounted for 6,125,606 tons, compared to 133,984 tons of wild harvests")
• Pacific oyster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_oyster
("is an oyster native to the Pacific coast of Asia. It has become an introduced species in North America, Australia, Europe, and New Zealand")
• Most oysters consumed in the US are farmed (so are those worldwide), particularly those in the west coast.
(B) "Historically speaking, Alabama happens to be the largest processor of oysters in the United States.": Alabama

This is true presently, even though Alabama has a short shoreline (around Mobile).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile,_Alabama
(section 1 Etymology: tribal name)
(B) Most oysters consumed in the US are farmed, particularly those in the west coast.
(ii) production worldwide:
(A) Oysters; Sources, quantities and cultivation methods. Seafish, undated
https://www.seafish.org/responsi ... ultivation-methods/
("China accounts for around 85% of globally farmed oysters and consumes almost all of its own production" followed by a graphic whose caption is "Global Oyster Production: Key Locations and Volumes 2018 (1)" where Reference 1 is "FAO FishStatJ")

Sea Fish Industry Authority or Seafish os a governmental agency in UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Fish_Industry_Authority
(B) But see Hsiao S-T et al, DNA Barcoding Reveals That the Common Cupped Oyster in Taiwan Is the Portuguese Oyster Crassostrea angulata (Ostreoida; Ostreidae), not C gigas. Scientific Reports, 6: 34057 (2016)
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep34057
("the Crassostrea species in Taiwan is C angulata and that no C gigas occurs in the natural environments of Taiwan and southern China sea waters. * * * Our result shows that C angulata has an Asian origin and probably was introduced to Portugal from Taiwan in the 16th century")
For cupped oyster, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyster
(section 2 Types, section 2.1 True oysters: "includes the edible oysters, which mainly belong to the genera Ostrea, Crassostrea * * * Magallana")
• What the report said was that contrary to what people had thought, C angulata was  not native to Portugal but probably brought from Taiwan to Portugal by Portuguese ships.
• A representative in the Ostrea genus is Ostrea edulis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostrea_edulis
, where the photo in the top right corner shows the shells are relatively flat, not cupped (as in the genus Crassostrea).
• Latin-English dictionary:
* ostrea (noun feminine): "oyster"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ostrea

(c) off-bottom oyster production:
(i) Walton, William C et al, Off-Bottom Oyster Farming. Timely Information. In Alabama Cooperative Extension System, July 2012 (appearing in the website of Texas A&M Univ AgriLife Extension)
https://fisheries.tamu.edu/files ... -Oyster-Farming.pdf

Please read the first three pages only. I call your attention to two loci:

"The condition of oysters decreases during the spawning season. When oysters spawn, the meats become thin and watery. As a result, the marketability of oysters is reduced during spawning season." page 2.

"Experiments with triploid oysters have allowed the production of non-reproductive oysters with good summer condition." page 3.

(ii) William N Shaw, Advances in the Off-Bottom Culture of Oysters. Proceedings of the Gulf and Caribbean Fisheries Institute 108-115 (1967)
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/18310951.pdf
("The Japanese began to experiment with off-bottom oyster culture in the late 1920's (Cahn, 1950). Seno and Hori (1927) determined that suspended oysters were fatter and grew faster than oysters growing on the bottom. Now over 90 percent of the ysters harvested in Japan are grown off-bottom (Glude, 1964)" )


(d) triploid oyster invented by Standish K Allen:
(i) Latest thing first.
(A) Standish K Allen, Jr, Faculty Emeritus. Virginia Institute of Marine Science, University of Virginia, undated
https://www.vims.edu/people/allen_sk/index.php
("Retired: 2021
Department: Fisheries Science
* * *
Education
• BS, Franklin and Marshall College
• MS, University of Maine, Orono
• PhD, University of Washington")
(B) Ximing Guo. Distinguished Professor, Department of Marine & Coastal Sciences, Rutgers University, undated
https://marine.rutgers.edu/team/ximing-guo/
(2007-  professor
2001-2007 associate professor, Rutgers University
1998-2001 assistant professor, Rutgers University
1995-1997 research assistant professor, Rutgers University
1992-1994 postdoctoral researcher, Rutgers University
PhD 1991 University of Washington, Seattle
MS 1987 University of Washington, Seattle
BS 1983 Ocean University of China, Qingdao)
(ii)
(A) Tom Walker, Standish Allen: The Man Behind the All-Season Oyster. Aquaculture North America, Aug 25, 2016.
https://www.aquaculturenorthamer ... season-oyster-1365/

Quote:

• "The triploid oyster has had a significant impact on oyster aquaculture in North America, and indeed, the world.  As a sterile animal, the triploid does not put energy into summer spawning.  This means they tend to reach market size faster and they also keep the taste and texture suitable for summer harvest.  If you eat a fresh oyster outside the 'R' months, most likely it’s a triploid.

"Oysters have two sets of chromosomes, making them diploids. Standish Allen Jr invented the triploid, an oyster with an extra set of chromosomes. Indeed, he actually invented it twice, using two different methods. * * *

• "The first time Allen invented the triploid oyster, he was a Masters student at the University of Maine, in 1979, working to develop a sterile Atlantic salmon.  “As a side project we tried to make some triploid oysters, which turned out more successful than the Atlantic salmon project,” says Allen.

"Allen calls that early work the 'induced triploid era.' He found that if he added the chemical cytochalasin B at the right moment after an oyster egg was fertilized, the egg would keep an extra set of female chromosomes while still adding one set from the male sperm.  The result was an oyster with three sets of chromosomes that was sterile.
• "Allen went out to the University of Washington in Seattle for his PhD in 1983 and worked with Pacific salmon.  'I kind of swore off oysters, he says * * *

• "While he was out in Washington, Allen started to hear about a Chinese doctoral student, Ximing Guo, who was working to develop tetraploid oysters because of the potential value they would have in breeding triploids.

"If a tetraploid (four chromosomes) could be crossed with a diploid (two chromosomes) the triploid offspring would have three.  But you had to make the tetraploid oyster first.

"Back on the East Coast in the early 1990s while Allen was an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, he was able to hire Guo as a postdoc. With some irony, they used a failed ['failed' because triploids are supposed to be sterile] version of first invention (the 'induced triploid') to create the second invention, to spawn the third.

"A fertile triploid is a contradiction in terms, yet they do exist.  Gou and Allen were able to find fertile triploids, which would accept the same chemical induction process they used to create them, to add a fourth chromosome.   And thus in 1993, a tetraploid oyster was created and could then be reproduced through regular breeding techniques to develop sufficient numbers of broodstock for commercial application.

(B) Christine Gallary, In What Months Should You Eat Fresh Oysters?  The Kitchn, Aug 16, 2023
https://www.thekitchn.com/myth-b ... -eat-oysters-223123
("oyster season is only in months that contain the letter “R” in the name. You know, September, October, November, December, January, February, March, April. Not May, June, July, August")  (emphasis original)
(iii) Centennial Story 5: Standish (Stan) K Allen, Jr (PhD, 1987). School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences (that is what 'fish' stands in the URL), College of Environment, University of Washington Seattle, Apr 11, 2018 (under the heading 'News & Events')
https://fish.uw.edu/2018/04/centennial-stories-5/
("While I was there [in Maine as master's student], the Maine aquaculture industry was being invented. These 'downeast' types were conjuring up new ways to grow salmon, oysters, clams, mussels, seaweed, and the like")
(A) University of Washington was established in 1861 (when it was a territory of the United States; statehood in 1889).
In 1919 College of Fisheries (COF) within University of Washington was formed, which was the first US College of Fisheries and the forerunner of School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences.
(B)
• down east (adverb): " * * * specifically : in or into coastal Maine"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/down%20east
• Down East
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_East
(also Downeast; section 1 Etymology)

(3)
(a) Michael W Fincham, Trials & Errors & Triploids: Odyssey of an Oyster Inventor. Chesapeake Quarterly (published by University of Maryland), vol 9, June 2010.
https://www.chesapeakequarterly.net/V09N2/main2/
("When Allen landed his first full-time faculty job in 1989 at the Haskins Shellfish Research Laboratory [at Rutgers University] in Bivalve, New Jersey, he remembered Ximing Guo and his theory about creating tetraploids. He also remembered that all of Guo's grad-school experiments flopped. * * * Out of his ]Guo's] multiple failures, however, came a hypothesis: perhaps the only way to create tetraploids was to start with large eggs from triploids.   It seemed a hopeless hypothesis since triploids weren't supposed to have eggs, and the search for a tetraploid oyster may have ended there, but for serendipity. In all his work with triploids in West Coast labs and hatcheries, Allen would occasionally spy through his microscope a triploid oyster with eggs. Never very many eggs — but perhaps enough eggs to test Guo's hypothesis. 'On occasion, triploids will make eggs," he explains, "and on those occasions you can use the eggs because they are fertile.' Biology, says Allen, is the science of exceptions, and in his lab work he had seen the exceptions.    Allen helped recruit Guo to the Haskins Lab, and in 1993 the two new faculty [in fact Guo was Allen's postdoc 1992-1994] began searching for that uncommon creature — a triploid oyster with big eggs")
(b) Yang, Huipin; Guo, Ximing; and Scarpa, John, Induction and Establishment of Tetraploid Oyster Breeding Stocks for Triploid Oster Production. Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS), University of Florida, 2019
https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/FA215
("Currently, triploid oysters are commercially cultured primarily in two species: the Pacific oyster Crassostrea gigas, a species cultured worldwide, and the eastern oyster Crassostrea virginica, a species cultured along the East Coast of the United States and in the Gulf of Mexico. Triploid Pacific oysters now account for about 50% of the production along the US Northwest Coast and most of the hatchery seed production in France (Degremont et al. 2016). In 2018, over 2.3 billion triploid Pacific oyster seed were produced in China (Guo, personal observation)" )

I have doubts whether people want to eat triploid oysters: The graphic in this report proves what I thought. Namely, the triploids are mostly sterile. So, one has to treat oysters with the chemical (cytochalasin B) every time he wants triploids. Hence, there is no need for you to read the report in (3)(b).