Hama Hama® Oyster Blog

Oysters are hardcore about sticking together. When clusters come in off the beach we try to break them apart into singles, but it’s generally impossible to do so without damaging the oysters. Now scientists at Purdue University have figured out exactly why that is: the oysters are cemented together.

Oyster shell typically contains 1 to 2 % protein, and oyster adhesive (or what they use to attach themselves to each other) contains 5 times that amount. But as explained in this NY Times article :

oysters seem to use far less protein in their adhesive than other marine animals do. Mussels and barnacles produce a softer glue with more protein, while oysters produce a harder cementlike material.

For centuries people have used oyster shell to make concrete, so it’s fitting that shells contain a cementlike substance. (Concrete = cement plus an aggregate like sand or gravel). Oyster shell concrete, called tabby, is made of oyster shell, lime (which you can extract from burned oyster shell) and sand. Depending on whom you ask, tabby was either developed in Morroco, then spread to Spain during the Moor conquest, and then introduced to the Americas with the conquistadors… or it was used in the New World before Europeans arrived (although none of these structures have ever been found)… or it was developed by the British. Either way, the U.S. Atlantic coast is the world’s epicenter of oyster shell tabby construction. Early colonists used oyster shell mined from Native American middens to build forts, chimneys, and even vats to dye indigo.

Someday, hopefully sooner rather than later, we’re going to construct something out of tabby. Maybe a fence. Maybe a wall. Maybe a tower. Maybe an outdoor chimney. Maybe just a giant tchotchke. Stay tuned.

Read how to make tabby.

Read more about tabby’s history on the east coast.

 A couple of weeks ago we put the beginning touches on our very first tumble farm.

The tumble farm is an energy-friendly oyster pruning device. We spend our days working around the tide, and here we’ve put the tide to work for us. Each of the bags pictured above is filled with oyster seed and attached to a buoy. As the tide comes up, the buoys floats, and the bags flip up and tumble the oysters. The fragile new growth gets broken off in the tumbling process, and in response the oyster forms a deep cup instead of growing long and skinny.

Tumbled oysters don’t necessarily taste any better than a wild oyster, but they have a more consistant shape… they are a nugget of oyster, brimming with brine, and perfect for eating on the half shell.

Sounds good, huh? Stay tuned for availability.

(Read our earlier post about oyster conformation here).

Yesterday we noticed some farm visitors taking a picture of the bulldozer that’s perched atop our giant oyster shell platform. The shell pile isn’t growing up, it’s growing out, and the machine is there to spread the shells around and make turnaround space for the dump truck. It also doubles as a tow truck whenever the dump truck gets mired in the loose oyster shell:

If you live within reach of the oyster farm you can come buy some oyster shell and help put a dent in our massive supply. The cost is $25 for a pickup truck load if you load it yourself, and $50 for a pickup truck load if we load it with our machine. And trust us: it’s worth the extra $25 bucks to have us load it. Half-crushed clusters of interlocking oyster shells are nearly impossible to shovel. Call the wholesale office 360-877-6938 to schedule a shell pickup.

By Annie

We caught this oyster spawn event just at the right moment… 15 minutes later and the spawn was gone, dispersed by the currents.

There’s a 325 acre wildfire burning in the Olympics just above the Hamma Hamma drainage, and it’s making things really smokey down here on the salt water. Here’s a night time photo from Cliff Mass’ weather blog showing the plume of smoke coming off the Olympic Peninsula (and another one on the southern end of Vancouver Island).

The fire was started by lightning on August 5th and smoldered for a few weeks until the weather got hot and dry. The Park Service is monitoring the fire and, so far, letting it burn. If you’ve done much hiking up the Hamma Hamma Recreational Road (in the Lena/Hagen Lakes/Mt. Stone area) you’ll be interested in the map on the incident website.

Barnacles with a sense of humor took it upon themselves to decorate someone’s lost pair of pliers to look like a sea monster:

And while on a beach walk today we discovered a particularly disgusting, previously unknown (to us), and brilliantly red worm:

Fortunately, biologist Dan Cheney with the Pacific Shellfish Institute just so happened to be on our beach conducting a vibrio study. He saved us a huge google headache by identifying the red worm as an intertidal nemertean, aka an orange or primitive ribbon worm, aka Tubulanus polymorphus. According to Western Washington University’s Field Guide to the Salish Sea, these worms can grow to 3 meters long, lay their eggs in the summer, and are found at low tide hunting for small crustaceans and annelid worms.

As it turns out, there are a lot of worms in the world.

See mystery worms #1, #2, and #3.

For the past several years oyster farmers in France have seen their oyster beds decimated by a new, more virulent strain of oyster herpes. The virus stays dormant until water temperatures get above 61 degrees Fahrenheit and then attacks oysters just as they are weakened by the effort of reproducing, killing as much as 80% of the population.

Now the virus has popped up in the UK. According to this National Geographic article, the disease may have spread on oyster harvesting equipment.

A less virulent strain of oyster herpes has been detected in California… but let’s hope this European monster bug doesn’t cross the pond.

Here’s a neat photo of oysters spawning:

Whose idea was it to designate August 5th National Oyster Day? Is there an Australian prankster embedded in the Bureau of Obscure Food Holidays who’s sabotaging our ability to truly celebrate our nation’s most valuable bivalve?

If you haven’t already heard: August is an iffy month to consume raw oysters. They might make you sick, and they might be spawny.  But maybe August is a fantastic time to be an oyster? The water’s warm, the sun’s out, you and all your friends and neighbors are spawning, and there’s less risk that you’ll be harvested and eaten.

Tomorrow we’ll be celebrating National Oyster Day by doing what we always do this time of year: frantically trying to recruit as much oyster larvae to our beach as possible.

The beach crew spent the morning bagging oyster shell. Later, during the oyster spawn, we’ll put the bags out on the beach to collect oyster spat in hopes of getting a good oyster set.

Spawn, spat, set. Read more about it here.

And we are unofficially naming February 5th National Oyster Day, observed.