LOC's nursery is full of oyster babies!
- Chris
- 23 hours ago
- 3 min read
Late spring/early summer marks the time when we make our trip up to Gwynn's Island to pick up our aquaculture seed oysters from Oyster Seed Holdings. Learn more about OSH.
Gwynn's Island is named after Hugh Gwynn. Around 1611, Hugh Gwynn was exploring the Chesapeake Bay and paused at a small island at the mouth of the Piankatank River. According to legend, he heard cries for help from an Indian girl who had fallen from her canoe. Upon seeing her in the water, he jumped in and rescued her. When asked her name, she replied, "Pocahontas, daughter of Chief Powhatan." In gratitude for saving her life, she gave the island to Hugh Gwynn, leading to the creation of Gwynn's Island.
The apostrophe in Gwynn's hasn't always been present. For numerous years, State and Federal documents mistakenly referred to the Island as "Gwynn Island." The late Mrs. Eleanor Respess, a native of the Island, tirelessly advocated for the correction to "Gwynn's Island." Eleanor eloquently stated, "You don't call it Martha Vineyard, so you don't call it Gwynn Island!"
Seed pick-up day is a full day event, as after the 4-hour round trip to Gwynn's Island and back, the seed must be sorted, bagged, and placed in water as soon as possible.
The seed is transported in fine stretch cloth with a simple tag indicating the recipient, the type of triploid (Henry), and the quantity.
Hatchery seed is conceived slightly ahead of nature intentionally to give young aquaculture seed several additional weeks of growth compared to their wild counterparts so they are better prepared for winter. Learn more about the natural oyster spawn here.
Now what?
Similar to human infants, these young oysters will experience rapid growth, and, much like humans, they will grow at varying rates. This variation is due to a mix of factors, such as minor genetic differences or the possibility that one oyster might be positioned in a more favorable spot in the bag, giving it better access to water flow and nutrients.
Each 4mm mesh bag holds about 3,500 oysters that are 6mm in size. These oysters will grow to twice their size in 6 weeks and will outgrow these 4mm mesh bags by the end of the summer. In 18-24 months, they will reach a size of 3 inches (76 mm), which is considered "market" size for oysters.
We like to visit the nursery frequently and gently shake the bags. The shells are very thin at this stage, so we handle them with care. Even when young oysters are stuck together, we often wait until they are older to separate them.
As the oysters mature, we begin to sort them by size. Some oysters may appear to have barely grown, while others seem to have grown significantly. This sorting process also involves thinning, but in our case, we are not removing the weaker ones to enhance the health of the others. We are simply organizing them by size, and as we do this, they need to be thinned because they now require more space. For instance, as adult oysters, approximately 200 oysters will occupy the same space that 3,500 did just two years earlier, meaning we now need around 18 bags to accommodate them!
And of course, once they reach adult size, we start to peel those animals off the farm for consumption, while the slower growing animals are sequentially growing behind harvest-ready oysters. This allows a consistent supply of market oysters even though we purchased all of our seed at one time. If the animals grew consistently without any differences, we would be over-inventoried between periods of low inventory. Thank goodness it works the way it does! Although more trips to Gwynn's Island and OSH would not be so bad.
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