Oysters: A complicated economy and ecology A complicated journey: From the bottom of the Sound to a restaurant

Oysters sit piled on a boat and ready to be unloaded at Norm Bloom and Son in Norwalk, Conn., on Friday, May 17, 2013. Oysters sit piled on a boat and ready to be unloaded at Norm Bloom and Son in Norwalk, Conn., on Friday, May 17, 2013. Photo: Lindsay Perry Photo: Lindsay Perry Image 1 of / 47 Caption Close Oysters: A complicated economy and ecology 1 / 47 Back to Gallery

NORWALK -- It's 6:30 a.m., and the oyster boat Grace P. Lowndes was making its way to oyster beds just a mile or two off the Norwalk harbor.

The trip only takes two hours. There are two boom-mounted dredges, one port, the other starboard. The dredges are lowered one at a time to the beds, raking the bottom for less than a minute. Then they're hauled up, their loads of oysters dumped on the steel-plated deck.

This routine is repeated dozens of times until the deck can hold no more, about 500 bushels.

"We just try to skim the surface," said Jim Bloom, whose dad, Norm Bloom, runs one of the largest oyster operations on the East Coast. "It's important not to damage the beds."

Bloom's product is known as the Cops Island oyster.

"We were the ones who popularized the Blue Point, but now everyone calls their oyster a `Blue Point,' even down in the Chesapeake Bay," he said.

The Sound was like glass that day -- but the oyster industry found itself in choppy waters this spring.

There were two bills before the state Legislature in Hartford that had big and small operators in opposite camps. One would have decreased the size of harvestable oysters from three to two inches. The other would have opened up more leases offshore.

The bills arrived at a time when the health of the Sound-- and potentially, its oysters -- remain under assault on a number of fronts, according to the environmental advocacy group Save the Sound:

Global warming is gradually raising the temperature of the water.

Invasive plant and animal species introduced from Asia are a constant threat.

Prescription drugs that people take often pass through the body more-or-less unchanged, eventually finding their way into the Sound.

Low oxygen or hypoxia episodes, which can cause mass die-offs, will likely continue until sewage treatment plants install nitrogen-removing equipment.

The remaining salt-water marshes, a buffer between the land and ocean environments, are under attack from rising sea levels.

And the use and overuse of pesticides, fertilizers and herbicides by homeowners in the watershed, which includes large swaths of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and New York.

"Things are a lot better than they were in the mid-20th century, absolutely," said Leah Schmalz, director of legislative and legal affairs for Save the Sound.

She added that expanding the oyster industry would help knock back the Sound's nitrogen load because oysters are filter feeders.

"But you start to get into Massachusetts and Vermont, and a lot of people don't realize that what they use on their lawns winds up in the Sound," she said.

She said that Save the Sound was in favor of the state Department of Agriculture's proposal to drop the legal size of oysters from three inches to two inches because it could've resulted in more oyster farming, and hence, a cleaner Sound.

"That bill would have jump-started oyster cultivation, and it really was a well-intentioned bill," she said. "It would have encouraged smaller, boutique oystermen into the field, and it was a good first step in the discussion. The oyster industry is one of our traditional industries here and we need to protect them."

Big vs. little

That bill and another bill that would've added more oyster leases pitted the small, one-boat operators against the big operators such as Norm Bloom and Son. But both bills died in committee this year.

State Rep. Terry Backer, D-Stratford, was opposed to the legislation.

"We fought for the three-inch limit years ago," said Backer, who suggested that harvesting oysters too soon would deprive them of their prime reproductive years.

"And the big operators really aren't that big, let's not forget," he said.

Norm Bloom pulled out a two-inch oyster from that day's catch.

"Now, look at that," he said, holding the diminutive bivalve. "Who would pay money to eat that? An oyster should fit in your palm."

Fresh oysters

Back on board the oyster boat Grace P. Lowndes, its dredges pick up the occasional horseshoe crab, fluke and whiskey bottle. Most of the oyster beds are leased from the state, some are owned. Some of the beds have been cultivated since before the American Revolution; some were even leased from King George III.

The two men on deck take turns opening the dredges and hosing down the catch. The generous dousing of seawater rinses off the silt and keeps them cool.

About 15 percent of the catch will soon find its way to restaurants far and wide; the rest is mostly shells and undersized oysters that will be tossed back on the beds to mature.

As the Grace P. Lowndes pulled up to the wharf, Jim Bloom muttered, "Now for the fun part."

The "fun" was about 30 minutes of frantic shoveling as Jim Bloom, the two deck hands and another young back from the oyster house shoveled the oysters off the deck and into cages. Then they were sorted by size, bagged and sent off to market.

It's like shoveling wet gravel, and when the deck was clear of every last shell, the Grace P. Lowndes headed back out for more.

"I'll only take out what I can sell. No more," Norm Bloom said. "After I fill my orders, that's it for the day because the product has to be fresh."

The chess game

Oystermen need the planning skills of an art thief, the management acumen of Vincent Lombardi and the patience of a spider. Oysters take three or more years to get to market size, but their growth can be slowed by sending them out to deeper, colder waters.

"Irene wiped out the oysters that were just getting started, so we'll have a lean year a year from now," Norm Bloom said. "So, we'll have to plan for that. I have to make sure that I can hang on to my boats and my (oyster bed) leases.

"If we have too many oysters to sell, we'll send some of them to deeper water to slow them down. We have to figure out how much we have and how much we want to sell."

Green industry

We hear a lot about over-fishing and how pulling too much life out of the oceans to feed the human population is slowly killing the sea. All of that is true, but oysters are a different animal. They are farmed, not unlike corn or strawberries, and as such their cultivation results in far more oysters than what would occur if they were left alone.

"Since oystermen farm their own grounds, it's an industry that's more like farming rather than fishing," said Ron Goldberg of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Milford, which has been working out oyster reproduction techniques since the 1930s. "And since they're working on leased beds, you don't have a situation where operators are continually going over the same grounds, looking for the same resource."

The result is far more biomass along the shallows of the Eastern Seaboard than what would occur if the mollusks were left up to their own devices, both scientists and those in the industry say.

"And since they're filter feeders, they're really quite effective at cleaning the water, taking out excess plankton," said Fairfield University marine sciences professor Diane J. Brousseau.

Encouraging their growth

Oysters, as is the case with many mollusks, are hermaphroditic. They are males for the first year or so, and then switch to the female gender. When the water warms, usually in July, production of eggs ramps up. They are released into the water where they are fertilized by sperm from the males, pretty much by chance.

"Basically, it's like `Strangers in the Night,' " said Brousseau. "The free-swimming larva, once they get to a certain stage, begin to get heavy because their shell is forming, and at that point they like to settle on a hard surface, often an old oyster shell that the oystermen put out for them."

Bloom's operation includes a laboratory, which his company largely bankrolls, where the environment group Harbor Watch/River Watch tests water samples from the rivers that feed the western Sound. Occasionally, sewage is found leaking into a river, and through a little detective work, the source of the break is soon found, said Don Bell, one of the workers in the lab, which relies heavily on student volunteers.

Bell said the oysters do their part, too.

"Each one, realistically, filters 20 to 50 gallons of water per day," he said.

Mom and pop

The oyster industry brings in more that $8 million a year to the state's economy, and Connecticut, despite its tiny size, holds its own compared to other oyster-producing states.

"Connecticut is one of the major players, to be sure, one of the top three states," said Bob Rheault, executive director of the East Coast Shellfish Growers Association, which represents 1,000 oyster and clam producers from Maine to Florida.

Many oyster farmers are also in the clam business, although their cultivation differs considerably. Rheault said just about all of the oyster farmers are small-time operators.

"Out of our 1,000 members, probably less than 10 of them have more than 10 employees," he said. "It's truly dominated by mom and pop operations, and those firms don't necessarily play together very well."

The ECSGA, he said, has attempted to institute a "bag tax" of a penny or so to pay for advertising for oysters. This advertising relies almost entirely on word-of-mouth, or for parents to introduce the delicacies to their children.

"But we are enjoying this renaissance of oysters -- raw oyster bars are opening up across the country. People are seeing that it's delicious, nutritious and sustainable. And, let's face it, it's trendy."

jburgeson@ctpost.com; 203-330-6403; http://twitter.com/johnburgeson