Every year, Jay Styron brings nearly 200,000 oysters into the world, raising them from 2-millimeter babies into 4-inch adults. Each of those oysters plays a vital role, he said — both as the marine ecosystem’s natural water filters and as the centerpiece of many an autumn feast.
Styron’s interest in oysters stemmed from a childhood spent playing in the marshes of Cedar Island and eating whatever the Atlantic Ocean served.
“Oysters, fresh fish, shrimp, crabs,” Styron said. “All that fancy food people pay a lot of money for.”
Oysters are an essential part of Cedar Island culture, he explained. His family harvested wild oysters during the fall and spring.
“We would steam them, roast them, eat them raw, fry them, just about any way you could have them,” Styron said. “Oystering … was just a normal part of life.”
He took a break from the oystering lifestyle when he began working at the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Center for Marine Science. Years later, while contemplating life after retirement, he felt himself drawn back to the shores of Cedar Island and the oyster.
Styron stumbled across the concept of mariculture, the cultivation of marine organisms for food, and discovered the process was already being used to farm hundreds of thousands of oysters in Virginia.
“I figured, if we can grow a good wild oyster,” he said, “why can’t we grow good cultured oysters?”
In 2007, Styron created Carolina Mariculture Company with his wife, Jennifer Styron. He plans to retire from UNCW in six or seven years to pursue the mariculture business full time, but until then every weekend he will make the three-hour drive up to Cedar Island to look after his oysters.
The Styrons buy them as nearly microscopic babies, or spat. One tiny bag of spat from a hatchery can hold 100,000 oysters, he said. He scoops them into a container with water and bits of shell, to which the babies attach and begin to grow. When they get large enough, he divides them into cages that float in the waterway.
While the floating cages allow the oysters to thrive in the warmer, more oxygenated water near the surface, they are also more vulnerable to the elements.
“The first year we started this, we had two or three tropical storms and a hurricane,” he said.
Styron and his wife tied the cages to a raft, anchored it in a nearby creek and drove back to Wilmington to weather the storm. When they returned, the raft was gone. They found it later that day, in the woods, with all of the oysters still alive in their cages.
“They’re pretty tough,” he said.
It usually takes between 10 and 16 months for the miniscule spat to grow into market-size oysters. Every weekend he and his wife pull in the cages and dump the contents onto what he calls their “old party barge.” Working side by side, they sort out the oysters that are market size and return the rest to their cages.
“By the time we get that little oyster at two or three millimeters and then we sell him … we’ve handled each individual oyster probably six to eight times,” he said. “So when you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of oysters … they’re like children we want to get rid of.”
Styron is one of only seven other oyster farmers in North Carolina. Virginia has more than 200. Perhaps for that reason, 75 percent of oysters eaten in North Carolina come from somewhere else, he said.
He hopes to change that statistic.
Styron is expanding his own business, he said, by doubling production during 2015. He has a lease for 6.5 acres of ocean floor and said he wants to completely cover that area with oysters and clams by the time he retires from UNCW. If the state of North Carolina would relax some of its policies restricting the location and size of mariculture farms, he said, more businesses could open, creating jobs up and down the East Coast.
Styron said the North Carolina Division for Marine Fisheries has already acknowledged the importance of the oysters through its actions. It dumps 20 million bushels of oyster shells into the water every year, a practice shown to help oyster colonies regenerate. Oysters, as filter feeders, naturally clean massive amounts of pollution and algae from their ecosystems.
Mariculture farms perform the same filtering function, Styron said. And if more farm-raised oysters were available, fewer wild oysters would need to be harvested from their natural environments.
The mariculture farms even appear to create their own basic ecosystems. Styron said small fish and other shellfish swim into the cages to eat the nutrients that gather inside. Sometimes, he said, the cages provide so much food the fish aren’t able to squeeze back out through the bars.
“They’ll hang out there … until we dump them back into the water,” he said, “and then they go get in the next size cage they can fit in.”
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