Oyster Blog — Oyster World

This year as part of our holiday newsletter we put together a gift-buying guide for oyster lovers. One of the items we included in the guide was a very unique oyster knife from Georgia, and that got us wondering what other handmade oyster knives might be floating around the internet. 1. For those of you who don't get our newsletter, here's the Georgia Oyster Knife. These knives are hand-forged and look like they'd last a lifetime. We're not entirely sure how to use one, but we would love to give it a try. They cost $25 and are available for purchase online.   2. Rory Conner handmade oyster...

From this lovely blog: Four kinds: hama hama (Hood Canal, Washington), kumamoto (Humboldt Bay, Cailfornia), island creek (Duxbury, Massachusetts), wellfleet (Cape Cod, Massachusetts). All amazing but the hama hama was my favorite. I was super duper excited about this one. Finding this blog post brought a welcome ray of sunshine into an otherwise soggy gray day. Fortunately for all involved: the downpour is dumping snow up in the mountains, so ski season is imminent.

Wednesday the weather was perfect. It was the kind of day that made you wish someone would pay you to tool around on a boat.  And that's what happened here on the oyster farm during our first official beach cleanup: we cruised around the HH estuary looking for stuff that didn't belong. The PCSGA organizes two annual beach cleanups, and over the years the shellfish growers have pulled a lot of nasty stuff out of Puget Sound. Our findings included two derelict boats, one of our own oyster grow-out bags, several tires that someone had used as part of a makeshift float, and a crunched...

The PCSGA set up a pretty impressive (and absolutely free) photo booth at this year's Oysterfest. See more photos of the happy campers.

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...