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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