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6/15/11

Residents and out-of-town visitors will consume more than 100,000 oysters today at the 21st annual Oyster Festival held on the Arcata Plaza, a fitting celebration for a region that has become a leader in oyster production for the state.

According to Tony Smithers, executive director of the Humboldt County Convention and Visitors Bureau, the festival has been recognized as the seventh-best food festival in the United States.

As festival-goers bite into freshly grilled Pacific oysters slathered in barbecue sauce or slurp back Kumamoto oyster shooters doused in lime, they may want to stop and consider where all of those oysters came from.

The history of oyster harvesting in the bay has seen its fair share of ups and downs. Prior to European settlement, Native Americans harvested the region's native oyster, commonly referred to as the Olympia oyster. In the late 1850s, the Olympia oyster's natural population was devastated due to over- harvesting.

Settlers from the East Coast looking for gold set up commercial oyster fisheries that rapidly consumed the slow-growing Olympia oyster stock, according to a report by the Department of Fish and Game.

Humboldt Bay didn't come back onto the map as a major oyster producer until the 1950s, when Pacific oyster seed was first brought to Humboldt Bay. Shortly thereafter, Kumamoto oyster seed was introduced.

A few years back, Coast Seafoods -- the largest oyster farming company in Humboldt Bay with about 50 employees -- underwent a rigorous permitting process that completely restructured the way the company harvested oysters. The company went from dredging, or hydraulically harvesting oysters off of the bay bottom, to suspending its oysters above the bay bottom on long lines strung between poles or on racks in bags.

Coast Seafoods General Manager Greg Dale said his company farms both the Pacific oyster and the Kumamoto oyster -- around 60,000 gallons a season, with each gallon containing 100 to 200 oysters.

Nowadays, farming facilities like Coast Seafoods receive Pacific and Kumamoto oyster seed from hatcheries that specialize in remote setting.

At these hatcheries, oyster larvae are placed in tanks that contain shell, referred to as mother shell or clutch, and sea water. The larvae metamorphose, no longer able to float in the water's currents, and settle onto the clutch, where they will remain for the rest of their lives.

Between 20 and 40 larvae will set onto one mother shell, but usually only half of those will grow into market-sized oysters.

Once the spat is attached to the clutch, it is then transferred to the oyster farmer where the mother shell is placed into large, long bags and piled up in an intertidal nursery area of the bay to allow the spat to grow and harden.

After the spats have reached about 3 to 4 millimeters in size, they are brought back to the plant where the mother shell is strung at intervals onto long, yellow lines. Those lines, a methodology referred to as long line culture, are then strung between a series of notched PVC pipes that are stuck into the bottom of the bay. In this way, the growing oysters are held off the bottom of the bay and away from predators.

According to Dale, oyster farming is anything but easy.

”It's tough work,” Dale said. “Our guys are out here working every day.”

Coast Seafoods also uses the rack-and-bag method to grow oysters. This technique is the primary means of farming for Humboldt Bay Oyster Co., according to owner Todd Van Herpe.

Herpe's company, which will supply roughly 18,000 oysters to today's festival, uses the rack-and-bag method of oyster farming because it produces single oysters that are not clumped together.

Herpe, who has been involved in the oyster industry for 19 years and has owned Humboldt Bay Oyster Co. since 2002, said he farms individually grown oysters because they are thought to be more aesthetically pleasing than those that are grouped together.

Typically, individual oysters are sold on the half shell in restaurants or for barbecuing.

The rack-and-bag method uses clutchless seed that is produced at a hatchery when larvae are set on finely crushed -- instead of whole -- mother shell. Each piece of shell is the size of the larvae. Because the seed is much smaller than the spat that is grouped onto the mother shell used in long line farming, it is grown in racks lined with fine mesh to prevent it from dispersing into the ocean.

The length of the growing process varies by oyster, but is time intensive -- regardless of which farming method is employed.

The Pacific oyster takes about one to one and a half years to grow, while the Kumamoto can take two to three years.

For Herpe, farming oysters is like being on a big conveyor belt, because they require constant care all year round.

”The concept is to keep feeding the conveyor belt,” he said. “If we aren't constantly taking care of it, nothing will come out on the other end.”

Herpe adds, it's all worth it. Not only does he enjoy the work, but he also enjoys the positive environmental effects the oysters have on the bay.

”Oysters serve a beneficial ecological purpose by filtering water (as much as 50 gallons a day per oyster), battling eutrophication and providing structure to the bay,” Herpe said.

According to Dale, not only are the oysters good for the environment, they are also just plain good.

Dale believes that Humboldt Bay produces some of the better oysters in the United States. When it comes to the Kumamoto, it may even be safe to say that Humboldt Bay produces the best.

”The Kumamotos are highly prized -- they don't grow everywhere,” Dale said. “They have Goldilocks' syndrome. That means they don't like it too hot or too cold, and for whatever reason Humboldt Bay works for them.”

Other major oyster farmers in Humboldt Bay are North Bay Shellfish and Aqua Rodeo Farms. 

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5/30/11

Scientists have been using small variations in the Earth’s gravity to identify trouble spots around the globe where people are making unsustainable demands on groundwater, one of the planet’s main sources of fresh water.

They found problems in places as disparate as North Africa, northern India, northeastern China and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley in California, heartland of that state’s $30 billion agricultural industry.

Jay S. Famiglietti, director of the University of California’s Center for Hydrologic Modeling here, said the center’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, known as Grace, relies on the interplay of two nine-year-old twin satellites that monitor each other while orbiting the Earth, thereby producing some of the most precise data ever on the planet’s gravitational variations. The results are redefining the field of hydrology, which itself has grown more critical as climate change and population growth draw down the world’s fresh water supplies.

Grace sees “all of the change in ice, all of the change in snow and water storage, all of the surface water, all of the soil moisture, all of the groundwater,” Dr. Famiglietti explained.

Yet even as the data signals looming shortages, policy makers have been relatively wary of embracing the findings. California water managers, for example, have been somewhat skeptical of a recent finding by Dr. Famiglietti that from October 2003 to March 2010, aquifers under the state’s Central Valley were drawn down by 25 million acre-feet — almost enough to fill Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir.

Greg Zlotnick, a board member of the Association of California Water Agencies, said that the managers feared that the data could be marshaled to someone else’s advantage in California’s tug of war over scarce water supplies.

“There’s a lot of paranoia about policy wonks saying, ‘We’ve got to regulate the heck out of you,’ ” he said.

There are other sensitivities in arid regions around the world where groundwater basins are often shared by unfriendly neighbors — India and Pakistan, Tunisia and Libya or Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian territories — that are prone to suspecting one another of excessive use of this shared resource.

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6/7/11

Arcata is hoping to complete a major portion of its most significant expansion of its wastewater treatment system before the year is over.

The city finished grading work last year for the two new Arcata Marsh ponds -- located within the Arcata Corporation Yard property -- and plans to be done with the planting for the ponds before November.

Environmental director Mark Andre said the new marshes will add 40 percent more acres of treatment to the current configuration.

”This is the biggest expansion in 25 years,” he said.

Once completed, the expansion is expected to provide increased performance for water treatment as well as the flexibility to improve treatment capacity. According to wastewater superintendent Eric Lust, the ponds are generally about three acres or smaller and are within the original perimeter of the oxidation pond established in the 1950s.

Lust said the new ponds will allow the plant to take other areas offline if necessary and avoid potential violations if any emerging pollutants occur.

”We've been making do with three ponds for over 20 years, so this is a big deal for us,” he said.

Lust said visitors to the marsh can expect to see work beginning in July -- weather permitting.

”We have a narrow construction window because of the weather,” he said.

Once established, the new ponds will take two to three years to operate fully.

The project is part of work being done by environmental engineer Robert Gearheart and Humboldt State University master students to improve the overall efficiency of the plant. He and several students work out of a lab located at the plant.

Gearheart said the students -- who are engineering students currently, but can come from a variety of disciplines, including chemistry and biology -- conduct water quality analysis, gather data and are working on upgrading the plant's operational manual.

For the expansion project, a student helped with the design work and started a nursery for the wetland plants that need to be planted.

”It's been a very active learning experience for these students,” he said.

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6/7/11

As the city of Arcata continues its largest expansion ever of its renowned wastewater treatment marshes, the status of its sanctuary ponds remains a question in the eyes of regulators.

Arcata staff and the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board said they are working on finding common ground for permitting without having a designation.

The city applied for a designation -- which would clarify whether the city's three sanctuary treatment ponds are considered federal or state waters -- from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers last August.

The city is worried that an apparent shift in how the marshes are viewed by regulators could force it to spend millions to develop a new treatment system and potentially imperil the marshes. The North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, however, isn't convinced that the way the wastewater is treated now is best for the marshes and their ecology.

Environmental Services Director Mark Andre said the city has decided to shift its focus from the designation to working on a water board permit.

”It's possible that (the designation) will be put aside for now while we're working on this other stuff,” he said.

The city is currently pursuing a significant expansion of its marshes. The two new ponds will be within the city's corporation yard property and are not subject to the designation discussion, Andre said.

Laurie Monearres, the regulatory north branch chief for the Army Corps of Engineers, said the process for the three existing sanctuary ponds is currently on hold.

”We're waiting on some more information from (Arcata),” she said. “It's possible that they may be withdrawing their request.”

Monearres said the designation would help determine what regulations and permits the city can obtain from the Army Corps.

In the meantime, the city said the discussions with the water quality control board are progressing.

The agency has said that it believes the ponds have always been subject to federal regulations .

The water board staff believe that the marshes, into which treated wastewater flows before eventually being discharged into Humboldt Bay, are subject to federal Clean Water Act regulations. They are “waters of the United States,” according to the regulators.

Board Executive Officer Catherine Kuhlman said she hopes a permit can be issued by next summer. Staff of both parties have been meeting to look at permitting options that treat the ponds as waters of the state in order to gain regulatory flexibility, she said, adding that there are many options the staff is considering.

”We all want to get to the same place, but we have some bureaucratic knots to untie,” Kuhlman said.

Andre said the plant's priority is still to ensure that water is treated before it goes into Humboldt Bay. He said he is optimistic about the discussions.

”I'm pleased that (the water board) is acknowledging the individuality of our system,” Andre said. “Therefore, the permit end should be tailored to the attributes, and that's important to us.”

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