Environmentalists to a point
The sun rises through a September mist that covers Willapa Bay like a down comforter.
John Herrold eases the family boat, the Tokeland, over submerged oyster beds marked only by spindly branches poking into the mud 14 feet beneath the bay’s surface. He flips a lever to winch an oyster “bag”—a heavy-gauge metal basket hanging from steel cable—off the port side, until the bag’s open mouth dredges against the soft bay floor. He lowers a twin bag off the starboard side.
Three and a half minutes later, Herrold pushes the lever again, and the port-side bag rises with a groan of the winch, slightly tilting the 95-year-old boat toward the bag as it emerges from the water, chock-full of oysters.
His brother, Roy, grasps the bag in gloved hands and, in one quick motion, swings the load toward the boat’s cabin and unlatches the basket. Six hundred pounds of oysters crash to the deck. Roy plucks an orange starfish out of the pile, as his brother lowers the empty bag back into the bay.
“It’s not scientific at all,” John says, reaching for the starboard lever.
An hour and 360 bushels of oysters later, the Herrolds steer the Tokeland toward the family home on Cougar Bend, where the Naselle River pours into Willapa Bay. The brothers are third-generation oystermen, not uncommon at Willapa, and one branch of their family tree stretches back to the Chinook tribe that foraged for shellfish before Europeans arrived.
“It’s always the same around here,” muses Roy, “but it’s always different.”
“The big change is Spartina,” John says. “I’ve seen it [go] from nothing to what it is now.”
“For the most part we’ve kept our beds clear,” he adds, pointing out some of their tidelands where the grasses have taken over the higher elevations but have been painstakingly cleared closer to the water. “We do everything it takes.”
As with Spartina, the oyster industry—worth about $32 million a
year to the region—suffers the brunt of any environmental imbalance on the
bay. Leaky septic fields and unknown bacteria sources harm water quality,
while some of the bay’s 40 invasive species—including voracious European
green crabs and deadly oyster drills—threaten their wallets.
“Oyster growers have always been environmentalists to a point. We have to be, because we need clean water,” John says.
Growers also are battling the “political nightmare” of burrowing shrimp. Unlike Spartina, the shrimp are natives. But they have been multiplying out of control since the 1950s—perhaps in response to declining predators such as salmon and sturgeon and the damming of the nearby Columbia River, which historically flushed the bay with fresh water, killing salt-loving shrimp.
Last year, oyster growers agreed to phase out their controversial, 40-year-old practice of controlling shrimp with carbaryl, a pesticide found in flea powder. The decision settled a costly legal battle with environmental groups, but it also left growers without an effective, affordable way to keep the shrimp in check. Patten and other scientists are helping growers try to find the solution, as the carbaryl clock ticks out by 2012.
Meanwhile, as with Spartina, overpopulated shrimp threaten more than just oysters and clams. They destroy tidal wildlife habitats for many species.
“Spartina has been devastating to the birds,” says Dick Wilson, a Bay Center oyster grower and bird-watcher, “but so have the burrowing shrimp.”
Nahcotta oystermen Dick and Brian Sheldon are working on both problems, but it costs plenty. For example, they figure in the past few years they’ve spent $6,000 an acre to clear the Spartina from just one of their 90-acre plots on the bay. The land is only worth $200 an acre, and it’s in a spot that’s frankly better for feeding birds than fattening oysters.
“Most of us have a family history of up to 100 years in the bay,” Dick Sheldon says. “As an oysterman, as a person, I just couldn’t see the bay going down the toilet.”
Eric Apalategui wrote about Pacific Foods founder and CEO Chuck Eggert in the fall 2003 Washington
State Magazine.
Bill Wagner is a photographer for the Longview Daily
News.
Biologist Sally Hacker at WSU Vancouver also combats Spartina, though a different species. Spartina
anglica threatens Puget Sound. Washington State Magazine reported on Hacker’s work in Summer 2002.
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