Jeremy Scheffer, owner of Spearpoint Oysters, carefully manipulated the hydraulic crane in his Carolina Skiff to lift an oyster-filled cage from the bow, then move it up and over the port side.
The fishing boat heeled over as the heavy wire-mesh cage, filled with more than 1,600 oysters — 14 bags, each holding 120 to 150 adult oysters — hung off the side.
The cage was slowly lowered into the cool, dark waters of Menemsha Pond. But it didn’t go far. Two green plastic buoys, one just above the cage and another bobbing on the surface, kept it in the current, six feet under water. A line kept the buoys anchored to the bottom.
It is the latest attempt to solve a problem for the Vineyard’s growing commercial oyster industry: how to ensure oyster seeds survive long enough in the water to become succulent bivalves suitable for restaurants and dining rooms.
Ever since local oyster cultivation started in the 1990s, the watermen kept their cages — which allow oyster seeds to feed and grow in bulk — on the seafloor. But Scheffer and others allotted deep-water lots found their oysters often didn’t receive enough oxygen or nutrients to thrive. Many grew too slowly, or died.
As a result, for the first time since Scheffer began aquafarming in 2010, he is suspending about half his 400 cages in the tidal current, and already has seen bigger, faster-growing Ostreidae, as the oyster family is known.
“They grow quite a bit faster,” he said. The other 200 cages are still on the bottom, about 20 feet down.
Like oysters themselves, growing conditions vary greatly across the Island.
In Katama Bay in Edgartown, which started with four oyster farmers in the 1990s, and now hosts 12 active farms, most oyster cages rest on the seafloor because it’s only six to eight feet down, according to Rob Morrison, shellfish constable for Edgartown.
Only one of 10 lots available for oyster farming is active in Edgartown’s Eel Pond, also known as Middle Flats, because farmers use the shallow pond to decontaminate oysters of disease in the open water before they are harvested.
Brothers Dan and Greg Martino of Cottage City Oysters, the sole oyster farm in Oak Bluffs since 2014, also use bottom cages off Eastville Beach in Vineyard Sound.
But in Lagoon Pond in Tisbury, which opened up three oyster farms in 2019, Jeffrey Canha, owner of Husselton Head Oysters, is growing oysters in 17 floating cages this year for the first time, and plans to install 183 more. He already has bought 555,000 oyster seeds for his floating cages.
Over the past three years, Canha said, he lost two-thirds of the 1.5 million oyster seeds he had tried to grow in cages on the Lagoon Pond floor.
“Warm water separates on top, and cold water stays on the bottom. There’s no oxygen on the bottom,” Canha said. “There’s no food there, either.”
Todd and Matthew Mayhew’s Menemsha Creek Oysters is active in Menemsha Pond, and is also hanging cages underwater this year. But other Menemsha oyster farmers have become discouraged, and the other eight lots aren’t being used, the Chilmark select board was told on May 8.
Hoping to spur production, Isaiah Scheffer, Chilmark shellfish constable and Jeremy’s brother, has alerted the eight farmers who hold those leases that they must show activity on their lots by March 31, 2025, or he’ll recommend their license not be renewed. The select board has the final say.
“There are a lot of hoops to stay in the business,” the shellfish constable said. “That’s something you have to go through in aquaculture.”
The 10 lots, each about an acre on the water, run east to west on the Chilmark end of Menemsha Pond. The scenery is lovely, and the oysters are sweet and salty to eat, but the work can be grueling.
“We’re out here most days,” Todd Mayhew said. “There’s always more work on the farm. The oysters need me to be out here.”
If oysters are left in the water too long, their shells will sink the buoys and grow into the cage. They have to be air-dried and culled, which means the farmers must separate dead shells and remove undersize ones. Mayhew takes them out of the water every three months, but said he’d like to do it more often.
Most oyster farmers buy their seed from commercial hatcheries in Maine, and they’re kept in upwellers, which operate like an incubator, on land until they’re about a fourth of an inch long. Then they’re put in a mesh bag and tucked into an underwater cage.
Scheffer moves his oysters through seven different mesh sizes as they grow to be adults, about three inches, over two years. Mesh bags filter water and nutrients in and out for the oysters.
Todd Mayhew used to run the Unicorn, a 75-foot dragger, with his father, Gregory, out of Menemsha. It tied up on Dutcher Dock, with the 72-foot Quitsa Strider II, owned by Matthew Mayhew and his father, Jonathan. They sold the draggers in 2014 and 2015 when they decided government regulations and quotas had become too burdensome.
The cousins switched to harvesting oysters instead. “We wanted to stay active on the water,” Todd Mayhew said.
They were forced to readjust again when they hauled in stunted or dead oysters from cages left on the seabed. Now 150 blue buoys bobbing in a line mark 150 cages hanging six feet below the surface.
He still has 70 cages on the bottom, but next year, he’ll buy more buoys at about $20 to $26 each. In theory, he can grow more oysters, since cages can be hung at different heights in the water, and not just laid end to end on the bottom.
Until this year, Tisbury aquaculture regulations restricted floating oyster cages because they attract birds, whose feces can contribute to the spread of disease and algae blooms.
But in February, after oyster farmers complained, the Tisbury select board changed the regulations to allow surface cages. Each cage must have a bird deterrent, anything from physical barriers to fake birds of prey, to old CDs; birds don’t like shiny things.
Oyster farmers are also getting help from the Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group and the Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit conservation group with offices across the world. During the pandemic, the conservancy set up a buyback program to take oysters that Massachusetts farmers couldn’t sell to restaurants, as well as big, gnarly ones no one wants to eat.
The Shellfish Group’s hatchery, in the former lobster hatchery on the edge of Lagoon Pond, takes the reproductive adult oysters, raises the water temperature to stimulate a release of sperm and eggs, and spawns oyster larvae.
Emma Green-Beach, executive director of the shellfish group, then helps the larvae — known as spat — fasten onto oysters shells donated by restaurants and raw bars. The result is called spat-on-shell.
The spat look like dots, just visible to the naked eye, and 10 to 15 attach to each shell. Green-Beach hopes they’ll double in volume in a few months, and as they grow, they’ll replicate how oysters grow in the wild — together in clusters.
The shellfish group has planted such spat-on-shell oysters in Edgartown Great Pond, including in an oyster sanctuary where they can’t be harvested, over the past 15 years in an effort to restore once-vibrant oyster reefs that were depleted by overfishing, harvest practices, disease, and runoff.
The group has also seeded Tisbury Great Pond with spat-on-shell oysters for 40 years.
This year, they gave some spat-on-shell oysters to the farmers in Lagoon Pond. Canha, owner of Husselton Head Oysters, took three five-gallon buckets, and on Friday he dumped all the shells into one of his floating cages.
Canha called himself a “foster dad,” because he’ll sell the spat-on-shell oysters back to the Nature Conservancy and shellfish group later this year for $500 per fish tote, which can hold 18.5 gallons, and the clustered oysters will be used for further reef restoration projects on the Island.
He called it a “private-public partnership,” because he’ll help grow what the shellfish group can’t physically or financially do themselves.
Green-Beach also has provided spat-on-shell oysters to the two other oyster Tisbury farmers in Lagoon Pond, and she hopes to eventually offer some to the Menemsha Pond farmers.
“We want to provide another market for farmers to sell their product,” Green-Beach said.
Stephen Kirk, director of the Massachusetts coastal program for the Nature Conservancy, said collaboration with the oyster farmers is essential for reef restoration.
“They’re the shellfish experts,” Kirk said. “We want to support them for our goals of a functioning ecosystem.”
Like seeing this partnership to keep our markets and ecosystems going.
Comments are closed.