Washington State Turns to Neurotoxins to Save Its Oysters
Six decades ago, when Dick Sheldon first got into the oyster business, the tide flats of Washington states Willapa Bay were almost free of blight. There were no crabs (well, almost none) and Sheldon used to hike onto the mud at low tide, with a bucket for oysters. “We’d walk a mile or more, even when it was freezing outside, with the wind blowing at 50 miles an hour,” he remembers wistfully, “and then we’d stoop to the mud and start gathering them and throwing them into the buckets.”
In Sheldon’s memory, the oysters were bountiful and the mud floor was firm and pleasant to walk on. Then the shrimp arrived, and everything changed. Burrowing shrimp dig holes in the mud and live there. They pock the tide flats with a zillion holes, and today Sheldon, the 80-year-old eminence grise at his family’s small Northern Oyster Co., considers Willapa Bay a vanished world floored by “quicksand. If you’re not careful out there,” he says, “you’re up to your waist in that shit.”
The shrimp began proliferating—mysteriously, like a plague of locusts—in the early 1960s. They dominated the bay floor where oysters lived, but back then there was a simple solution: The oystermen just bombed the shrimp with carbaryl, a DDT-era neurotoxin. The shrimp, which few humans would want to eat, died. Oyster harvests were good, and along the bay, in towns like Nahcotta and South Bend and Oysterville, eight now-defunct oyster canneries flourished.
By the early 2000s, though, carbaryl had become a legal liability. Numerous researchers have linked the chemical to cancer, and in 2002 environmentalists strong-armed the Willapa/Grays Harbor Oyster Growers Association (WGHOGA) into beginning a 10-year phaseout.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-04-24/washington-state-turns-to-neurotoxins-to-save-its-oysters
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