“When we’re struggling, they’re struggling,” Dewey said. The demand for oyster larvae is high, he added, and Taylor isn’t meeting that demand for its own facilities, let alone for the oyster companies it supplies seed to on the West Coast. Ekone Oyster Company in Bay Center, Wash., has been a longtime customer of Whiskey Creek and last summer, when Taylor Shellfish acquired Ekone, they continued the larvae purchases and plan to bolster orders to provide more certainty for a broader array of seed needs in the future.ĭewey said the company is grateful to have its Kona, Hawaii, facility as an invaluable backup for seed and larvae when the Dabob Bay hatchery experiences high mortalities. Taylor Shellfish has a strong relationship with Whiskey Creek and Dewey said the two companies trade notes to help each other out. “It is not unusual to have seasonal production issues that leave us scratching our heads to sort out,” said Bill Dewey, Taylor’s director of public affairs. “We struggled with seed and larvae production through summer last year and we continue to do research and try to remain optimistic.” When oyster farmers like Taylor Shellfish Farms run into in oyster larvae production problems, as they did last spring, they turn to Whiskey Creek. Right now, we can keep up with the demand for larvae but in the summer time the demand is off the charts.” “Heating water is not cheap, and you need good people to handle the water because it’s very sensitive. “You have to look at what it takes to produce this stuff – it’s a lot of work,” he said. Demand is high and the price keeps inching up, Wiegardt said. The larvae are priced between $150 per million up to $250 per million, depending on the species and the risk involved in producing it. You have to constantly watch what’s going on with your incoming water.” “The water is still problematic and we never assume it can or will be better. “Some will inexplicably die for reasons we don’t know,” he reflected. But there’s still attrition in the three-week timeline it takes to produce oyster larvae. With a better understanding of the problem, production at the hatchery has improved significantly. We learned that if we could start the larvae out in better conditions, their survival rate would go way up.” “Ten years ago we found that by day 10 we’d have die-out based on day-one conditions. “The first three days after spawning are critical and it’s crucial to have good water on day one,” Wiegardt said. It is not unusual to have seasonal production issues that leave us scratching our heads to sort out. Adding sodium carbonate helped raise the pH of the water, making it less acidic, and the installation of monitoring equipment in the hatchery helped staff understand when ocean-driven conditions like upwelling, which tends to drop pH, are at their worst. We didn’t know if it was low-pH water, hypoxia or a low saturation state due to low calcium in the water.”Īfter a great deal of trial and error, Whiskey Creek’s hatchery manager, Alan Barton, made a correlation between larvae survival and low-pH water. “The tricky part was trying to identify the reason they were dying. “We had a heck of a time in 20 trying to get the larvae to survive,” Wiegardt said. Ten years ago, eye larvae production tanked and attrition rates soared, and since then it’s been a constant search for solutions. He’s relieved that daily production has returned to decent levels these days, in the region of 40 to 50 million larvae. Wiegardt’s spouse, Sue Cudd, is the owner of Whiskey Creek Oyster Hatchery in Tillamook, Ore., which sells oyster eye larvae to oyster farmers up and down the West Coast of the United States. If there’s one thing Mark Wiegardt has learned during 50 years of shellfish farming, it’s that ocean water is unpredictable. Shellfish growers like Taylor have been confronting high larval-stage mortalities for oysters and other shellfish during recent years. Farmers from East and West coasts learn to be proactive about mitigation efforts Taking a close look at larval geoducks at Taylor Shellfish Farms’ hatchery in Quilcene, Wash.
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