Due to breeding on tables in the sea, safe for crabs and roof snails, oyster breeders make their harvest safe

There have been years that oyster fisher Markus Wijkhuis (50) saw his harvest fall by two thirds compared to his average. “That has been a black page,” he says, at the helm of his ship on the Oosterschelde. “We had a very difficult period. The proceeds were left behind while the costs continued. But we had to continue.” Five years ago it was the “low point” for the neighborhood house. The cause of the misery was the oyster borer, a few centimeters of roof snail that kills oysters on the seabed. Wijkhuis takes a copy of the exotic who drills a hole in the shell of the oyster and eats the meat. “We went to six hundred thousand oysters a year in three years. You can’t make ends meet with such a production, it’s that simple.”

In the meantime, the company of Wijkhuis is on top of it again, and he is sailing, at the start of the traditional oyster season, from the Oyster capital Yerseke with a club of journalists and Food Influencers To his plots where he is too smart. Thanks to the construction of ‘oyster tables’, a method that is new to the Netherlands. “But in countries such as France they have been doing it for a hundred years,” says Kees van Beveren, chairman of the Dutch Oyster Association. In the shelter of a sandbank, poles have been built in the water on which oysters are in bags, unreachable for the oyster borer, the snail that can crawl but cannot swim, and cannot reach these oyster tables.

Employees of the company of Wijkhuis, including his son Antoine, turn the bags daily, and shake the oysters together. “By shaking, we inhibit growth. They should not put their energy into growing their shell, but in the fish,” says Antoine (22) who, stabbed in a wading suit, stands in the water to his waist. The company buys young oysters, six millimeters in size, at one of the brothers, a so -called Hatcheryand puts fifteen hundred of it in a bag. Every six months the oysters are selected until, after three years, about one hundred and fifty per bag remain. Ripe for consumption.

Oysters on the seabed

The oyster tables should not be considered as the rescue of oyster fishing, for that the share of the oysters cultivated on tables is not large enough. “Growing young oysters on the seabed is and remains the easiest and most efficient,” says Beveren, chairman of the Oyster Association. The Oosterschelde, a European protected Natura2000 area, is ideally suited for this due to the limited current. About five million pieces are brought ashore of the table stabs every year. For comparison: the ‘Creuse’ oyster species is fifteen to twenty million pieces; And from the ‘flat Zeeland’ oyster one and a half to two million. In addition, the oyster borer is kept away from the oysters as much as possible.

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Be off Bottom systems, such as the ‘oyster tables’ such as in France and Australia, a welcome addition, says Pieter Geijsen, manager at a Hatchery In Yerserke. Geijsen: “You can grow baby choirs on the seabed, but there are scratches that run away with it and eat them, just like fishing, and since seven years also the oyster borer.” The oysters are safe on the tables.

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A small luxury for everyday

A large part of the Zeeland oysters are consumed in Belgium. But, the fishermen, based on research by the Zeeland trend watcher Anne van de Vijver, are discovering the oyster in particular. “We see a trend towards quality, simplicity, a small luxury for everyday life. The oyster is a product in which this small luxury comes to the fore without a torque and grandeur,” says Van de Vijver. The oyster fishers hope that not private oysterrapers will get this growing popularity. Whoever wants to, can now pick ten kilos per person every day. “Far too much,” says Beveren, Chairman of the Oyster Association. “We have been trying to get that amount down for years. It cannot be that bus loads full of rapers come here, and some even deliver to hotels, while we have only received nature permits with great difficulty to grow the oysters in a responsible manner.”

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