He proudly tells the story of Morris Scott, an old-time oysterman. I have a neighbor who is trying to get his leases approved for aquaculture.” ![]() “There eyes just light up, they know this is going to work. ![]() “What excites me is there are old oystermen who come and see what we are doing with our aquaculture,” said the oyster grower. Mauer has been growing caged oysters for the past ten years. He says there is absolutely a future for seafood on Grand Isle and it’s coming back. Markers of the bottom caged oyster lease of Jules Melancon at sunrise. On Grand Isle caged oysters are grown in floating bags or on the bottom. “ When asked, I just tell everybody I’m out,” he said. Mauer and two others grow oysters in the older one located near the bridge. A new park, across from the Louisiana Department and Wildlife and Fisheries facility, has eight leases five of them belonging to GoFish. He admits to growing oysters again, but isn’t telling anybody because of the high demand. Grande Isle currently has two off-bottom oyster parks. “I didn’t have a tremendous amount of cages out before Ida hit, only about two hundred because eight months earlier Hurricane Zeta wiped me out,” he told Gulf Seafood NewsSeven months after Ida made landfall he admits he is still cleaning up from the storm. His responsibility during the storm was keeping the generator going on his brood stock and larvae. The Louisiana Oyster Company has been an effort to provide a reliable source for seed oysters.ĭuring Hurricane Ida, Mauer evacuated to the hatchery at Baton Rouge where his business partner Steve Pollock produces the seed. Reliable oyster seed production has been holding back not only the Gulf oyster aquaculture business, but also the East and West coast. Mauer said that the $400,000 loss wiped out any chance for profit, as well as set back caged-oyster growers in the Gulf depending on the seed. “We had orders for all those seeds and we had enough seed to fill all the orders.” “But the storm knocked out the natural gas feeding the hatchery generator. It got hot and we lost most of those seeds.” “As long as it stayed cool they would have been good,” he said sitting at his desk at his camp. The two oyster seed entrepreneurs were also allowed to store seed at LSU’s Sea Grant’s hatchery. I figured if I took this to a university that it was my ‘Ace In the Hole’, boy that didn’t work out. We lost everything there. “I evacuated ten million of our larva to Texas A&M-Coprus Christi. They did an emergency import. They ended up killing the batch. “Right before Ida we finally were producing a lot of seed. I was trying to get shipments out and protect what we had at the hatchery in Baton Rouge,” said the oysterman who has focused his attention on seed production since Hurricane Zeta wiped out his operations in 2020. ![]() Ida managed to take out those at the hatchery and those in Texas died from unknown causes. Intermediate part-grown oysters (size 8 at 55 units/kg.Grand Isle aquaculture oysterman Scott Mauer can attest that even the best-laid plans to avoid disaster often go astray. As Hurricane Ida approached Louisiana, his seed-oyster business partner Steve Pollock and him evacuated more than ten million larva to Texas A&M University, and stored another twenty million at the LSU Sea Grant hatchery on the island.From size 6 to final part-grown oysters.** Size 8 from intermediate grow-out systems in the sea available. In Bags (mesh size 4 to 6 depending on sites) Our nursery spat thus grows from 1 mm to size 6 and is raised in an environment that is as close as possible to its own natural environment in order to obtain high-quality oysters.įor all information regarding the characteristics of our products and prices, please contact us. Raised in the controlled environment of a micro-nursery until it reaches a size of 1 mm, our oyster spat is then passed through a sieving machine in water and sent on to a nursery. We mainly supply two sizes of oyster spat directly from our nurseries : size 6 and size 8. Nursery Oyster spat - Diploids and Triploids
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