Science & Planet, Many people may have enjoyed delicious oysters to the wonderful festive table. If it’s about the French – according to some, are still the best – we can ensure start make. French growers store the alarm about the future of the delicacy. In addition to higher temperatures of the sea water also prolonged droughts and encroaching viruses for panic. The climate change would be the harvest just last year, with 30 per cent have decreased.
France is the fifth largest producer of oysters in the world, after China (83%), South Korea (6%), Japan and the USA (both 3%), but the growers are so many worries. “We have almost no more seasons, but the four are indispensable for the growth of the oyster,” says Mathieu Le Moal, a grower from Brittany. “There are cold winters, so the shellfish can rest and mature,” said Yoann Thomas from IFREMER (Institut français de recherche pour l’exploitation de la mer).
with No plankton, no oysters
In the oesterboerderijen in the bay of Cancale, in the west of Brittany, well known because of the many oesterbedden, panic the growers also about the long drought of last summer. “It has barely rained,” said Bertrand Racinne, a other breeder. “By the rain, mineral salts to the sea, which make for plankton, the staple food of oysters. But if there is no plankton, grow the oysters. Result: we have oysters, but no large ones.”
Philippe Le Gall, the head of the French association of schelpdierkwekers, explained to the news agency AFP that oysters containing 10 grams less to weigh the price already plunging. 4,500 oesterboeren in France sold in 2017, approximately 100,000 tonnes at an average price of nearly 5,000 euros per tonne. Usually this is France at an average of 140,000 tonnes per year. “Oyster producers saw in 2018, their harvest by 20 to 30 percent,” said Le Gall. “The global warming starts to have an impact.”
Viruses
The rise of the seawater temperature promotes the spread of viruses that oysters attacks. In 2008, the French oestersector to contend with an herpes virus, that when equally massive young oysters affected. That virus is harmless to humans, but is becoming more and more aggressive. This pathogen thrives best in water between 16 and 24 degrees, noted researchers at.
In August 2013, died, 80 percent of the adult oysters in oyster farms in France. Most of the analyses being then on another deadly bacterium, vibrio aestuarianus, which had also already occurred in Brittany. Also that bacteria thrives well in higher temperatures.
Fish north continue to draw, to the rising sea temperatures to escape, would also in the future new diseases can bring to the French oesterbanken.
Move to the north
a Lot of French producers fear even that the warming of the earth, oyster farms, will force to go to the north to relocate, possibly outside of France. But see that most of the oyster producers from the region.
