Oysters, Water Purifiers And Pearls!
As reported by The American Food writer M.F.K. sheds light on, “American oysters in the book, titled “Consider the oyster. in 1941.
An excerpt reads. ”American oysters differ as much as American people. Those that start their lives on the Atlantic Coast inhabitants spend their childhood and adolescence floating free and unprotected from the tides, conceived far from their mothers and their fathers by milt let loose in the water near the eggs, while the western oysters lie within special brooding chambers of the maternal shell. inseminated and secure until they are some two weeks old.
A special mention to Shannon Lee and is gratefully acknowledged for the enlightening article on Oysters in Silica magazine, 2020.
In the 1800s, the oyster population in the Atlantic Ocean's Chesapeake Bay was able to filter water from the entire estuary in just three to four days. Oysters are saltwater bivalve soft bodied mollusks that live in marine or brackish waters. They filter over 3.7 liters of water in just one hour
Today, it takes about a year due to drastic reduction of oyster population due to over harvesting, habitat loss and diseases.
Oysters change genders due to environmental. nutritional and physiological stresses. They mature as males and change to females later on in their adult life, sometimes back again. There are two varieties of oysters; edible oystersand Pearl oysters. Edible oysters are the true oysters from the family of Ostreidae. Pearl oysters from the entirely separate species family Aviculidae.
Pearls are the only gemstone that is produced bt a living organism. Almost all shell-bearing mollusks have the ability to develop pearls, though they are considered to be of value as those that arrester borne. The largest pearl oyster is Pinctada maxima, which are roughly the size of a
dinner plate and are found around the Philippines, indonesia, Australia and Fiji.
When harvested in the wild, only about three or four oysters in a two metric ton haul will contain
commercially viable pearls, making them extremely valuable. in 1916, a British biologist in Japan
named William Saville-Kent developed the process of "perliculture" along side his Japanese colleagues Tatsuhei Mise and Tokichi Nishikawa, allowing to be farmed instead of harvested Despite looking exactly the same as natural pearls, farmed pearls are much less valuable. Pearls are created when an irritant such as sand enters a mollusks's chamber.The mollusk coats that object with a substance called nacre, or mother of pearl. This process takes between three and
seven years.
The Hudson River was once home to over 890 square kilometers of oyster reef, making its uch asthe Billion Oyster Project (B.O.P.) in New York, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation in Maryland, and the Florida oceanographicOyster Restoration (FL.O.O.R) are working to restore local oyster reefs, collecting discarded oyster shells from restaurants to create ideal substrate for oyster larvae to latch on.When oysters are harvested the correct way, they are among the most sustainables
