WHAT’S THAT ON MY OYSTER?!?!
Occasionally we have customers asking about various forms of
sea life that sometimes inhabit the shells of our oysters.
The most common of these are small shrimp like crustaceans that
bloom at different times of year. They are always out there,
on both coasts, but at various times of year they go through a big
hatch and they are particularly abundant. In the wild, they are
on everything: kelp, rocks, pilings…. and
oysters. All our oysters are cleaned to some extent by the
farm prior to packaging, but there are certain types of oysters
that are particularly prone to retaining this type of inhabitant.
Most commonly we find them on beach-grown oysters, as the shrimp
themselves are crawling all over the bottom. We see less of
them on rack and bag or suspended culture oysters because they are
grown up off the bottom. It is very difficult to completely
rid beach grown oysters, with their big thick barnacle encrusted
shells, of these animals since they are able to hunker down between
the barnacles, inside the hinge, or within the ridges of the shell
itself.
We are
sometimes asked “If they are so common, why don’t we see them on
the east coast oysters we get?” The answer to that in many
cases is that they are too old. These shrimp die very
quickly, and a lot of the oysters from the east coast that are sold
on the west coast come via truck. The animals just can’t
survive that long out of water. The fact that they are on our
local oysters at all is a testament to how fresh they are.
While it is
probably not in anyone’s best interest to have these things jumping
all over a customers plate, it is also important to know that they
are not in the least bit harmful. They are, for all intents
and purposes, small shrimp. A thorough scrubbing followed by
a fresh water spray before being opened will usually remove those
that remain from harvest.
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