Booming oyster aquaculture for halfshell trade owes a lot to triploid oyster inventor
SEAFOODNEWS.COM [The Atlantic] By Dennis Holliersep - October 2, 2014 - Standish Allen and Ximing Guo deserve a lot of credit for the explosive growth of farmed oysters for the halfshell trade.
Over the past three decades, Allen’s patented innovations in oyster culture have transformed this old-fashioned industry with the triploid oyster.
Natural oysters are diploid—each of their cells contains two sets of chromosomes, one from each parent. Allen’s innovation has been to create oysters with three sets of chromosomes. The uneven number results in a mostly infertile oyster that, because it doesn’t waste energy producing gametes—eggs and sperm—grows bigger and faster than natural oysters.
That means they can be harvested earlier, before they’re affected by the diseases that have laid waste to natural oyster populations in places like the Chesapeake Bay and the estuaries of Normandy.
But the biggest advantage is that these triploids are fat and marketable year-round, even during the warm summer months when natural oysters tend to be unsavory, either because their bodies are comprised mostly of gonads, or because they become thin and watery after spawning.
These characteristics—higher yields and a viable summer product—are why farmed triploids have largely replaced naturally harvested oysters in the nation’s restaurants and oyster bars. Most of the oysters produced today are still diploids and many are shelled and often destined for use in processed oyster products, while some go to the half shell trade.
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