美国国家公共电台 NPR The Oyster's Mighty Comeback Is Creating Cleaner U.S. Waterways

The Oyster 1's Mighty 2 Comeback Is Creating Cleaner U.S. Waterways

ELISE HU, HOST:

Oyster farms are rapidly sprouting 3 up along America's eastern shoreline. Production doubled in just the past six years, driven by the farm-to-table movement. As Delaware Public Media's James Morrison reports, the comeback of the oyster, which are filter feeders, are also good for our waterways.

JAMES MORRISON, BYLINE 4: Jimmy Parks is shucking the meat out of a cell-phone-sized oyster shell and preparing to drop it into a deep fryer.

JIMMY PARKS: For my fried oyster platter, I do my - I toss the fries in Old Bay for a little more Maryland flair 5.

MORRISON: Parks is a longtime chef and owner of The Butcher Station in Winchester, Va. He says the way we eat oysters 6 has changed in the past 10 years.

PARKS: As much food as possibly can go on my plate at the least amount of money I can spend used to be the way things were. And now people are getting away from that, and they're gravitating more towards I want cleaner sources.

MORRISON: Not only are we demanding clean sources, we're becoming foodies. A decade ago, you probably would have just ordered oysters. Now, we pay attention to the taste profile, which is sometimes called a merroir of where our oysters come from. Oysters from New England are usually saltier than Chesapeake Bay oysters, which are considered milder and with a buttery finish.

PARKS: Now there's, I think, over 3,500 different varieties of oysters in the world, but only five species. So it's all about where they come from. So each area has a unique oyster to their water.

MORRISON: I'm heading out to Tim Devine's oyster farm in the Chesapeake Bay. He was a photographer in New York before starting Barren Island Oysters in Maryland five years ago.

TIM DEVINE: The cages come up, and then they dump them into here. The upfeed takes them up into our chipping mechanism 7, which is - they call it a tumbler. It is essentially 8 a rock tumbler that has some holes in it that sorts oysters.

MORRISON: Devine grows a strain of oysters that are immune to diseases that have devastated 9 wild oyster populations, and his operation is sustainable. He's taking nothing out of the water except the nutrients 10 his oysters have eaten, and he's putting nothing in but the cages that hold his oysters.

DEVINE: The coolest thing is within our cages we see these little shrimp-like creatures that actually eat the pseudofeces of the oysters. And then things like seahorses and crabs 11 and other things eat those little guys, and then the food chain has begun.

MORRISON: The cages are creating reef-like habitats, and that's helping 12 small sea creatures survive. But the biggest benefit of these farms could be their ability to filter water.

GULNIHAL OZBAY: Oyster tissue is being blended in the blender. So now they are going to process it.

MORRISON: Gulnihal Ozbay is an oyster researcher at the University of Delaware. She says oysters are filtering phytoplankton and excessive nutrients out of our waterways.

OZBAY: It's like almost like in the aquarium 13 we have filters, same thing with oysters.

MORRISON: Farmed oysters are raised in clean, monitored waters, so they're basically making clean water cleaner. Ozbay says what we really need are sacrificial oysters in our most polluted waterways.

OZBAY: These are filter feeders. As they filter, they will accumulate some of the contaminants.

MORRISON: States like Virginia have these programs and are working to expand them. East Coast states are also processing a backlog 14 of applications to lease thousands of acres of sea floor for new oyster farms. For NPR News, I'm James Morrison.