PCSGA Tidings

By Cate Gable
Chi­nook Observer columnist

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 Con­tinue Reading »

Inte­grated Multi-trophic Aqua­cul­ture Work­shop
Penin­sula Col­lege
Port Ange­les, WA USA
Sep­tem­ber 14–15

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/​P​a​c​A​q​u​a​_​N​e​w​s​/​2​0​1​0​/​0​8​/​i​m​t​a​-​w​o​r​k​s​h​o​p​-​r​e​g​i​s​t​r​a​t​ion

Penin­sula Daily News

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 Con­tinue Reading »

By MARK ALAN LOVEWELL

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 Con­tinue Reading »

By CAIN BURDEAU
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

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 Con­tinue Reading »

Folks,

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

By HEIDI JON SCHMIDT

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 Con­tinue Reading »

Bei­jing, Aug 4 (IANS) Chi­nese sci­en­tists have drawn the world’s first genome sequence map of oys­ters, open­ing new pos­si­bil­i­ties for increas­ing oys­ter pro­duc­tion and devel­op­ment of indus­trial mate­ri­als.
The map was also the first of its kind for both shell­fish and marine life, said Zhang Guo­fan, chief sci­en­tist of the Oys­ter Genome Sequence Map Project and researcher with the Insti­tute of Oceanol­ogy, Chi­nese Acad­emy of Sci­ence (IOCAS).

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 Con­tinue Reading »

Fresh water was released from the Mis­sis­sippi River to push oil out of Louisiana’s coastal marshes. By many accounts, the action was suc­cess­ful but may have had a dam­ag­ing side effect: killing large amounts of oys­ters in the marshes.

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 Con­tinue Reading »

There is increas­ing con­cern that ocean acid­i­fi­ca­tion, caused by the uptake of addi­tional CO₂ at the ocean sur­face, could affect the func­tion­ing of marine ecosys­tems; how­ever, the mech­a­nisms by which pop­u­la­tion declines will occur have not been iden­ti­fied, espe­cially for non­cal­ci­fy­ing species such as fishes. Here, we use a com­bi­na­tion of lab­o­ra­tory and field-based exper­i­ments to show that lev­els of dis­solved CO₂ pre­dicted to occur in the ocean this cen­tury alter the behav­ior of lar­val fish and dra­mat­i­cally decrease their sur­vival dur­ing recruit­ment to adult pop­u­la­tions. Altered behav­ior of lar­vae was detected at 700 ppm CO₂, with many indi­vid­u­als becom­ing attracted to the smell of preda­tors. At 850 ppm CO₂, the abil­ity to sense preda­tors was com­pletely impaired. Lar­vae exposed to ele­vated CO₂ were more active and exhib­ited riskier behav­ior in nat­ural coral-reef habi­tat. As a result, they had 5–9 times higher mor­tal­ity from pre­da­tion than current-day con­trols, with mor­tal­ity increas­ing with CO₂ con­cen­tra­tion. Our results show that addi­tional CO₂ absorbed into the ocean will reduce recruit­ment suc­cess and have far-reaching con­se­quences for the sus­tain­abil­ity of fish populations.

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.

The rapid growth of the oys­ter aqua­cul­ture indus­try in Rhode Island has raised ques­tions about how many oys­ter farms Nar­ra­gansett Bay and the state’s salt ponds can sup­port. But a study by a Uni­ver­sity of Rhode Island grad­u­ate stu­dent has found that these ecosys­tems can with­stand con­tin­ued high rates of aqua­cul­ture growth with­out caus­ing eco­log­i­cal harm.

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 Con­tinue Reading »

By DAVID KAMP

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 Con­tinue Reading »