Hama Hama® Oyster Blog

On Monday a group of Bellevue Christian School students came by to tour the oyster farm. They were on the first day of a week long field trip around the Olympic Peninsula. We walked out on the tideflats to look at shore crab and clam trails, and then took a tour of the wet storage and oyster shucking facilities.

And this isn’t at all appetizing, but it is hilarious, so we’re going to share it anyways. One of the students, under pressure from his classmates, volunteered to be the first to try a raw oyster. We didn’t even think to offer him any instruction, so he came up with an oyster eating technique all on his own, which involved taking a big bite out of the belly of the oyster:

Stay tuned for a post about the correct way to eat a raw oyster.

Some people get really into oyster plates. And you can love oyster plates without loving oysters. As this site put it:

In the Pacific Northwest, oysters are still a popular seafood choice; however, even if you shudder to think of eating such a slimy creature you can still create a lovely display of oyster plates from such famous makers as Haviland/Limoges, Wedgwood and Minton. In fact, the collecting of oyster plates seems to be escalating as their use diminishes.

They obviously sell plates, not oysters. But, the plates are really cool.

All photos above from this site, and they generally cost too much to use. The majolica plate below found here. You can  find reasonably priced oyster plates for sale on Ebay. And if you’re burning to know more about oyster plates you should buy the book.

Oysters go through a larval stage, swimming around in the water for about 2 weeks, and then they settle down, develop shells, and remain stationary for the rest of their lives. Oyster larvae can set on just about anything: wood, rocks, other oysters, and metal. This particular oyster made his home in an old butter clam shell.

Giant white piles adjacent to the shucking plant aren’t anything new… although normally they’re made of oyster shell, not snow. The winter storm of 2008 is turning out to be the most persisent in living memory, which is why we’ve written 3 consecutive blog posts about it. But here’s a change of pace:

This giant mass of oysters came across the table the other day, and Roberto was so stricken with it he pulled it out of the shucking pile. He was planning on taking it home and baking the oysters open in the oven. A very unscientific survey of the oyster cluster estimated a population of between 30 and 40 oysters, ranging in size from giant to teensy.

Nathan, posing with the oyster cluster:

Chesapeake Bay:

The oyster native to the East Coast, Crassostrea virginica, hasn’t been doing well in the Chesapeake for a while. Reasons for the virginica’s decline include overharvesting, pollution, and disease. The loss of the native oyster reefs has hurt the Bay’s shellfish industry and ecosystem, as oysters filter algae out of the seawater and provide habitat for numerous other species.

For the past couple of years, government officials have been moving forward with a plan to introduce a Chinese oyster, C. ariakensis, which appears to be resistant to the diseases that have decimated the native oyster populations. The ariakensis oysters introduced into the Bay would be triploid oysters, which means they wouldn’t be able to reproduce (more on this below), but still, the plan to introduce a non-native species is controversial.

For more, read The Chesapeake Bay Journal, and Rowan Jacobsen’s excellent NY Times op-ed, “Restoration on the Half Shell.”

Meanwhile, there’s confusion in France:

According to the British Telegraph, French oyster farmers are blaming the recent oyster herpes outbreak on the fact that the industry has largely switched over to farming triploid oysters.

But astute readers will remember that originally French scientists blamed the virulence of the herpes outbreak on the fact that the oysters had exhausted themselves developing their reproductive organs.

And triploid oysters are genetically incapable of developing reproductive organs.

Hmm….

Definition: Triploid oysters, although not technically ‘genetically modified,’ as they contain no foreign genetic material, have three chromosomes instead of two, which makes them sterile. Because they don’t waste energy on reproduction, they grow much faster than regular diploid oysters.

Hama Hama oysters are good old-fashioned, fully-functional diploids.

The fringe, or bill, is the most colorful part of the oyster shell. Sometimes the bill is dark, sometimes it’s very light:

Or even multi-colored:

This analysis of oyster cultivation in Korea claims that an oyster’s shell color, along with its growth rate and spawning season, is determined by growing location. According to this study, oysters grown in the most favorable conditions grow fastest, get biggest, spawn latest, and develop light gray shells.

We think the color differences are genetic, not environmental. The oysters in the middle picture above are very different in color, and yet were harvested from the same spot and are the same size, age, and shape.

Occasionally we see oysters with extraordinarily fluted shells, which is also something we attribute to genetics:

One possible explanation: We’re not sure if there are billions of oysters in Hood Canal, or only hundreds of millions. Either way, the genetic diversity of the Canal’s wild oyster population is off the charts.

Yes! You can find pearls in Hama Hama oysters. The shuckers normally find several a day. Pacific oyster pearls aren’t valuable, but they are really cool. (Jewelry pearls are produced by pearl oysters, which are in a different genus than edible oysters. Read this for more information about cultured and wild pearls.)

These pearls (there were originally 600 of them) all came from ONE medium sized (and extremely irritable) oyster.

The stork recently dropped off a crate of oyster seed from a California hatchery. Here’s a handful of them:

Jose and Cleo spent an afternoon putting the babies into grow-out bags:

which will protect the seed from predators such as snails and crab.

The bags were strung together and then placed out on the beach. In 3 months, the oysters will be big enough to face life on the beach without the protection of the bags. And after another 2 years or so, the oysters will be big enough to hit the market as beautiful, and very single, oysters on the half-shell. Sound attractive? You can get hooked up with some over the internet right now, just go to our store site.

Liberio, explaining how he’s going to use a barge to drag the string of oyster boxes out onto the beach at high tide.