Woodman, who grew up fishing on ponds, is also a surfer and feels particularly drawn to water. “But I’m pretty athletic and strong and there are wise ways to solve any problem.” Woodman invested in some unique equipment to creatively address wild-harvesting obstacles. She uses a specialized beach cart with big wheels to move her harvest, and also bought a floating creek cooler that looks like a mini kayak, so she can safely ice her oysters and keep picking in the summer heat. “I was told that it would be too cold, too wet, that oysters would be too heavy for me,” she says. The way it made me feel was amazing, and I decided then to try wild picking.”Įmbracing every aspect of her new vocation, Woodman shrugged off any suggestion that the work might be too tough for a woman. We were making our way through the waves in the darkness, with just the moonlight shining on the water.
Collect wild oyster spat full#
“I remember walking out to a grant one night under a full moon. “Every day is an adventure and everything is constantly shifting,” says Sonya Woodman, who began wild harvesting two years ago, after several seasons working for shellfish farmers. “As a woman, seeing a number of other women recently entering the fishery was a joy,” says Civetta.įor three local women, both the challenges and the rewards were what drew them to this exacting occupation. You live by the tides, you live by the weather, and you need to know where you are going and what you are doing.” While the majority of wild harvesters are men, there are women who have been working on the flats for decades and female rookies join the industry each year. “The job is physically demanding, and you work in all kinds of conditions. “It isn’t for everybody,” says Wellfleet Shellfish Constable Nancy Civetta, of the wild fishery. Wellfleet currently oversees close to one hundred shellfish farms, the most of any town in the Commonwealth, and in 2020 the town’s Shellfish Department issued 175 permits to wild harvesters. In 1606, French explorer Samuel de Champlain surveyed the area and named it “Port Aux Huitres” or “Oyster Port.” In the late 17th century, shellfishing drove the economies of early European settlements, and by the late 18th century, the Wellfleet oyster was already being overfished as well as severely impacted by naturally occurring disease. An initial community effort in the early 1800s to reseed the harbor’s estuaries launched the town’s ongoing aquaculture efforts.
Native populations regularly harvested wild oysters for food. History shows that Wellfleet’s sheltered harbor has been ideal for oyster harvesting for centuries. There it grows for the rest of its life, perhaps spawning new seed if the conditions are right, until it is ready to be plucked from its aqueous home by another rare breed, a wild oyster harvester. It wafts through the cold and salty waters of Wellfleet harbor and its estuaries before settling on a suitable solid surface, such as a rock, piling, or old shell. However, a more accurate picture of the situation might be obtained with more variable markers.A wild Wellfleet oyster (crassostrea virginica) begins its life as a free-floating larva. No significant differences were found between wild and adjacent farmed populations for the number of alleles and observed heterozygosity, which supports the conclusion that current methods used to collect wild spat are unlikely to affect the genetic composition of pearl oyster populations. This suggests that large-scale dispersal, either due to the absence of barriers to natural larval migration, or to the transport of collected spat for pearl production. No genetic difference was observed among samples from wild populations collected from Northern Tuamotu to Southern Gambier. In this study, we analysed the structure of genetic variability, in wild and farmed populations distributed on four atolls from the Tuamotu–Gambier archipelago using four anonymous nuclear loci. A good knowledge of these resources is thus essential for the rational management of farmed and wild populations. Production relies almost exclusively on the collection of wild spat, which makes the activity very dependent on natural resources. Pearl production, based on the aquaculture of the blacklipped pearl oyster Pinctada margaritifera, is an essential economic activity in French Polynesia.
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