Thursday May 1, 2014

 
Today I did a lot of reading!  (Mostly due to the fact that I was really tired and couldn't summon the energy to do much else.)  I also met with Mr. Meleo, which was really nice, because I was able to rant about my life.  I always have a lot on my plate during the spring, but for some reason it all came to a head today.  Everyone was annoyed and tired, so they kept trying to take it out on everyone else.  My worries stemmed from prom, friend, and dance drama, which were also combined with stress from school, AP exams, and senior projects.

Moving on.  My reading today was from Shucked.  In the sections that I read, Island Creek Oysters set up the upwellers, received their first shipment of seed of the year, and cultured the seed.
The book explained Island Creek Oysters flupsy in great detail.  In the year that the book was written, they had 3 flupsys, each containing 8 silos, which equates to 24 silos.  (The silos are each 2.5 feet deep and 2 feet wide and long.  They weigh about 40 pounds dry and 70 pounds wet.)  These 24 silos will hold all the oysters ordered that year.  The three flupsys are organized by mesh size: tens, twenties, and thirties.

What interested me most about the seeding process is its labor intensity.  The seed are crucial to the next year’s profit, so they are cared for meticulously.  They are checked on constantly to ensure that they have an ample supply of water, because if they don’t they can foul themselves to death.  (Fouling is when oysters secrete a mucous filled with anything that was in the water that they did not want to eat.  Fouling is essentially oyster poop.)  The seed must also be sorted every week.  Larger seed are sieved out from smaller seed and placed in different silos with a larger mesh size.  Sieving is performed by hand and is vital, because larger seed can stunt the growth of the smaller seed by using up the resources.  Another part of the seeding process is setting up the nursery, which involves repairing and cleaning the system from last year.

Something I realized during my senior project is that oyster farming is really labor intensive.  When I first began, I did not know about all the work that goes into culturing shellfish.  I assumed that you just put them all in bags and let them grow by themselves, but there’s a lot more to it than that.