Oyster Fest 
Consider the Oyster
There is no greater delicacy than a plate of live, briny bivalves—and no richer source of them than the Gulf Coast. Yet in Galveston Bay, where acres of reefs were obliterated by Hurricane Ike, empty waters are causing oystermen to hang up their nets. Is this the end of our precious mollusk?
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Then there’s bio-politics. Oystermen fret that evolving regulations will poison their trade, such as the attempt last fall by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to force fishermen to freeze or pasteurize oysters before sending them to market, a process that kills not only bacteria but the oysters as well. The effort was quickly struck down by Gulf Coast lawmakers, but the FDA could resurrect the idea again this spring. “Some restaurants refuse to buy untreated oysters, especially in the summer,” explained Clifford Hillman, who has been in the postharvest processing business for 23 years and owns plants in Dickinson and Port Lavaca. Hillman uses a cryogenic freezing process that is fast and does minimum cell damage. It doesn’t change an oyster’s taste or texture—or so Hillman and others claim. But I don’t believe this for a second. I’ve always thought that slurping a live oyster directly from its shell, inhaling that fresh, wild, sweet, delicate aroma, was one of life’s most sensual experiences. Dead oysters taste—dead.
What an amazing animal, the oyster. People ascribe qualities approaching the realm of magic to this silent, self-sufficient little mollusk. It is thought by some to be a stimulus to the brain and probably an aphrodisiac—a belief not necessarily supported by hard evidence. Oysters have been staples at orgies at least as far back as Nero. Anyone who has looked lovingly at an oyster understands how it came to be popularly identified with the female anatomy.
Oysters are a triumph over nature herself. They sequester harmful carbon dioxide and use it to create their protective shells. Anytime the species’ reproductive cycle gets out of balance, they can change their sex. Each one is a small filter system, able to pump fifty gallons of water through its body every day, retaining for its own nutrition organic material like plankton and algae while filtering out even the nastiest toxins. Oysters are the lungs of our coastal systems. Galveston Bay, despite its unappetizing backdrop of refineries and rusty tankers, is actually relatively clean, thanks partly to the Clean Water Act of 1972 but also to its abundance of oyster reefs: If the bay looks murky, it is only because it is teeming with the things oysters like to eat.
The life cycle of an oyster is delicate and perfectly calibrated to its habitat. When water temperatures in Galveston Bay drop in the fall and winter, oysters start storing a sweet-tasting carbohydrate compound called glycogen. From January until the end of March, Gulf oysters are the fattest, sweetest, and probably best-tasting in the country. But as the weather starts to warm in late April—when it’s nearly time for oysters to spawn—they begin converting glycogen to gonad, a reproductive material that tastes fishy and flat. By summer, oysters have lost most of their body fat and taste like wet cardboard.
Oysters are the canaries of the bay, Sammy informed me as we boarded the ferry back to Galveston. “If oysters are doing well, the bay is healthy.” Even though he is officially retired from teaching, Sammy still goes seven days a week to his cramped little university lab on the Fort Crockett campus. One of several diplomas on his wall is signed by Denton Cooley and certifies that Sammy is a “Specialist in Cardiology of Ostrea virginica.”
Ike was an aberration, Sammy believes, a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. As a scientist, he considers the oyster’s primary threat to be something more insidious: salinity. Salt in moderation is essential to estuaries, where most marine life begins, but if the concentration is too high—or too low—it can kill shellfish. In fact, most environmentalists, scientists, and commercial fishermen believe salinity to be the bay’s most pressing issue. Sammy, who travels regularly to different parts of the Texas coastline, had recently returned from Copano Bay, where, for the first time in his life, he’d found evidence that oysters were starving to death. The villain, he suspected, was salinity so high that it inhibited the growth of the plankton that oysters feed on.
Now that Ike had destroyed so many reefs, I asked Sammy if there was a danger that Galveston Bay could end up like Chesapeake Bay, where a century of reef dredging, drought, pollution, and oyster diseases has nearly wiped out the oyster industry. “Chesapeake Bay is different,” he answered. “It’s deeper, and it’s dependent on a number of rivers from different states with conflicting sets of regulations.” But yes, it could happen. The Trinity River supplies more than half the inflow to Galveston Bay, and wind-driven tides, which work like a giant mixer, create an unending squeeze play between the freshwater and the saltwater. This causes places in the upper part of Trinity Bay to be so low in salinity that oysters die of the freshet, or too much freshwater. “But our biggest problem,” Sammy said, “is protecting the crop from predators and parasites.” When salinity gets above fifteen parts per thousand or when water temperatures go above 70 degrees, he explained, predators like the oyster drill and parasites like Dermo thrive—and can greatly reduce the population of oysters.
Except for emergency measures such as closing East Bay and appropriating $2.5 million to clean up Ike’s damage to public reefs, Texas has done little so far to help its oystermen. Following Hurricane Katrina, the government of Mississippi dumped bargeloads of shells into its bays to create new reefs; in Louisiana, the state ensures that shells are deposited in the bays prior to spawning season, and it plants oyster seedbeds, where fishermen can gather juveniles to stock their leases. In Texas, there are no such official seedbeds. “This isn’t a commercial fishing state,” Joe Nelson explained. “It’s a recreational one.”
The state has begun some restoration on the bay’s east side, dumping in tons of river rock to create new reefs. It has also announced plans to hire out-of-work oystermen to dredge up layers of shells currently buried in the muck. The rock and recovered shells will give oyster larvae the kind of hard, clean subsurfaces they need to keep the life cycle going. The project won’t get under way, however, until this May. Many oystermen wonder if it’s too little, too late. “By the time a new crop is ready to harvest, we will have lost four years,” Joe told me. Most of his peers believe the state should just shut down Galveston Bay and give it time to recover. “They should close all the bays and do it right now,” Ben said. Halili agreed: “We were very upset that they didn’t close the season. The bay is in bad shape. People are going out all day and coming back with seven sacks, ten sacks.”
“We can close the bay for biological needs but not economic ones,” Lance Robinson told me, noting that Texas Parks and Wildlife has in fact closed East Bay for two years to allow the oyster population to recover. Oystermen could lobby the state for further relief for the industry, but given the stubborn independence and mistrust of government that persists among bay locals, that’s not likely to happen. In Louisiana, fishermen occasionally come together long enough to force the state to address their needs, but as Ben told me, “Texas fishermen can’t agree on nothing.”
For someone with an irrepressible taste for oysters, this is a grave tragedy, because as I see it, one long-term problem for Galveston Bay is that no one seems willing to practice quality control. Gulf oysters aren’t truly tasty until the weather gets cold, and yet the free-for-all at the start of the season means the reefs are practically bare by the time they would be at their sweetest. The only way to remedy a rushed harvest of oysters that may not be at their prime is for Texas Parks and Wildlife to delay the season until at least Christmas. Or, perhaps, to stagger the opening of the season from bay to bay. Small-scale oystermen worry that such changes would threaten their livelihood—the holiday demand for their product and the revenue it brings are impossible to ignore—but I think they’re wrong. I believe this kind of oversight is the only way to ensure superior oysters and sustain the oystermen’s way of life.
Nobody knows how long it will take the bay to recover. “Some of the habitat will come back naturally as currents sweep sediment off the reefs,” Robinson told me. “But not nearly enough to reclaim what we’ve lost. That will take decades.” In his book, Walsh suggests that the future of the industry in the Gulf may be a hybrid of oyster farming and wild harvesting, similar to models used in Louisiana and Connecticut, where leaseholders buy seed oysters from hatcheries or state oyster beds. Either way, oyster prospects look bleak for now. But a few oystermen are optimistic. The hardy little creature, after all, was here before recorded history and will probably outlast the human race. “Animals have a way of knowing, an instinct to prolong life,” said Ivic. “If you catch a pregnant killer whale, she will find a way to birth her baby before she dies. Oysters will breed new generations. It will take a while, but we are sitting on a gold mine.”
See a slide show of images of the oyster industry, from bay fishermen emptying nets to platters of mollusks waiting to be eaten.
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