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What I am about to tell you about the oyster's strange sex life and its role in American history came from splendid articles by Fred Conte, Department of Animal Science, University of California, Davis; Richard Jay Hooker's splendid article "The Day of the Oyster" in Cuisinart's October 1978 Cooking Magazine; Anna Oberthus Associated Press feature in The Santa Rosa Press-Democrat entitled "Tomales Bay Oyster Vanishing"; and Carola Saekel's San Francisco Chronicle article entitled "Pearls of Wisdom." I urge you to read the originals to get their full seagoing flavor.
When this continent's first English settlers landed at Jamestown Virginia, they were astonished by lobsters up to six feet in length and oysters one foot in diameter! During one dismal period of a snowbound winter with dwindling food supplies, Captain John Smith dispatched a group of his pioneers upriver to try to survive by eating oysters. This worked.
By the end of the 18th century, oysters were peddled day and night on the streets of most colonial cities and towns by hawkers who rolled barrows full of the bivalves while howling, "Oys! Oys! Getcher Ersters!." New Yorkers stripped and killed the oyster beds on Oyster Island in New York Bay then ate up all the Blue Points in Blue Point , Long Island. Baltimore and Washington found huge oyster beds in Chesapeake Bay and Boston cleaned up all the oyster beds for miles around.
American oysters surprised visiting Brits because our bivalves were so huge. After eating a single oyster, William Makepeace Thackeray said he felt "as though he had swallowed a baby." Others described plate-sized oysters which had to be cut into many pieces before one could eat them. In this oyster-slurping era, The Revere House in Boston used 100 gallons of oysters a week. Savannah, Georgia's consumption of oysters produced enough leftover shells to surface a mile of highway and New York City shelled out 3500 British pounds per day for its oysters!
A stagecoach called The Oyster Line carried barrels of bivalves from Baltimore to Western Virginia and Ohio. Canal boats on the Erie Canal took oysters packed in ice to Buffalo and other lake towns. When the first shipment of Eastern oysters arrived in Chicago by sleigh from New Haven, Connecticut, the Lake House threw an expensive champagne and oysters party to celebrate the great event.
Not only the rich enjoyed oysters. Everyone could afford oysters and beer. Eastern cities had oyster parlors and oyster saloons on every corner. Wagons sold oysters on the streets along with biscuits, peppers, and beer, all for a few pence.
A British traveler wrote, "The oyster is the national dish of the United States, or at least the Atlantic States." When rumors of gold attracted thousands of Americans and Europeans to the West Coast of California, they brought along a taste for oysters which quickly depleted the native supply. One San Franciscan '49er had a long wait for his steak at dinnertime so he invented the oyster cocktail by dumping some oysters into a glass and filling it up with ketchup and horseradish. Others, seeing the shortage grow, tried to import Eastern oyster sprat by clipper ship so that they could restock San Francisco Bay. The sprat didn't make it; but when the railroads punched through the Rockies, one of their first payloads was Eastern oyster sprat which survived and expanded the Bay's beds. Eventually, however, agricultural and industrial pollution plus the dumping of inadequately-treated sewage into the bay by most of its surrounding towns destroyed the fish and shellfish. Now we have arrived at the canaries.
Whenever early-day miners went into coal mines they took along yellow canaries in cages. They kept an eye on their canary and if it keeled over, they ran like the devil for the exit because a dead canary meant coal gas that kills. Similarly, if you see any protected bay that does not have healthy oyster-farming or natural oyster beds, you are looking at a body of water that man has killed. The lowly oyster is the canary of the clean environment movement. If he thrives, the whole web of sealife and birdlife survive too. And just maybe if we can clean up all of California's waters so that oysters can grow again, we might insure our own survival.
By now you may have gotten the idea that the oyster is a dull creature fastened to a rock or a cage, being fattened for the market; but wait a minute. Oysters are the blueprint for the future of humankind. How? Well, teenagers these days try to convince us that they are discovering all the variations of sexual behavior known to man but frankly, compared to the oyster, they are completely "out of it."
In an oyster's first year of life "it" or rather "he" is usually a male. Near the end of that year "he" decides to become a "she" and in a few weeks, like a chicken, "she" starts laying eggs except "she" lays them inside her shell not outside.
"She" then checks the inflowing waters and admits water that includes "male" sperm cells floating around. Then "she" lets the eggs inside her shell get fertilized, nurtures them for ten days or two weeks then boots them out to make their way in the world of the ocean. Having concluded that part of its life, the oyster says "nuts" to being a Mom any more and turns itself back into a husky male. How's that for sexual adventure?
Talk about a shell game! Let me quote the University of California, Davis review of the oyster: "California native or Eastern oysters are rhythmical consecutive hermaphrodites. They can change sex either annually or within a closer interval." And there you are.
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