The Rise and Fall of the American Oyster and Why It’s Important Now
This little creature has something to say to all of us.
English settlers in Virginia and Maryland were the first Western civilization witnesses to the astounding number of oysters to be found in the New World. These tasty bivalves formed mounds of living creatures on top of generations of others going back five thousands years since the last great melting of the glaciers. Some of these oyster reefs were several kilometers long and tens of meters high.
In the early 1600s the oysters in Chesapeake Bay were so numerous they could filter the entire volume of the bay weekly and keep the water clear down to 20 feet. Francis Louis Michel, a Swiss visitor to Chesapeake in 1701, remarked, “The abundance of oysters is incredible. There are whole banks of them so that the ships must avoid them. . . . They surpass those in England by far in size, indeed, they are four times as large.”
It wasn’t long before these early settlers emulated the native Americans by walking out in bay waters and scooping oysters up by the dozen for a meal. The newcomers would not stop at hand picking this enormous resource, however, and ever more efficient methods of collection came into play. First came raking, then tonging (see picture of tongs), then dredges, and eventually…
