Oysters!

Last summer I had a job which required me to drive around Virginia Beach restaurants picking up trash cans full of rotting oysters.  I cannot even begin to describe the smell!!!  It was certainly a humbling experience.  It had a really cool cause though.

The company that I worked for was called Lynnhaven River Now.  They do a lot to conserve the Lynnhaven Oyster, which for a while was inedible and becoming endangered due to pollution.  The Lynnhaven Oyster is really the only edible seafood that comes from the Lynnhaven River, so it’s a tourist must when it comes to eating out in Virginia Beach.

There are two main issues with saving the Lynnhaven oyster population: 1) Reduce Pollution and 2) Protect the oysters when they reproduce.  My summer job tackled Issue #2.  Oysters need other oysters or hard surfaces to latch onto when they reproduce.  This project was a way to return the shells to their natural habitat, which maintained the natural setting of the river as well as provided a better breeding ground for the once threatened oyster species.

I would drive around to restaurants with a tractor trailer, dumping sloshy, maggot-ridden cans of picked apart oysters into crates.  There were 19 restaurants that participated in this “Save Our Shells” program.

So, once I had all the smelly oysters in the back of the tractor trailer, I would go to the city landfill and dump each crate one by one into a dumpster.  By the end of the summer, we had filled three dumpsters with oysters.  Each trip totaled to about a thousand pounds of oysters- which is actually insane.  This was all done in above 100 degree weather.

The reason for the oyster dumpsters was to allow them to dry out and get sunbleached so they didn’t smell so terrible.  So basically I had the dirty work.  Once they were all dry and pearly white, other people in the group would take the oysters and dump them back into the river.  They formed oyster reefs, which is kind of like a coral reef for baby oysters.  In nature, seagulls eat oysters and drop their shells in a reef formation.  This dumping of the recycled oysters mimicked that process.

So, that is what I did this summer.  It was crazy-disgusting but it was something that I was passionate about.  It kind of reminds me of revegetating a coal mine spoil.  The goal is to bring the original natural setting back to a place that has been damaged by man.

I just thought I’d share this with you guys…most people don’t really know much or care about oysters.  If you have any questions, consider me your shellfish expert.

-Grace