♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Pam Halstead: Hi, I'm Pam Halstead and this is "Field Trip."

We're here today at the Hog Island Oyster Company, which is the only place in California with a commercial shellfish hatchery.

What's that about?

I don't know but we're gonna find out.

I'm so excited.

Here we go.

♪♪♪ Pam: Hi, I'm Pam and I'm so excited to be here at the hatchery.

Juan Avellaneda: Hey Pam, my name is Juan I manage the hatchery for Hog Island Oyster Company.

Pam: Nice to meet you.

Now, can you tell me something about a hatchery?

'Cause when I think of hatchery, I think of chickens and salmon and what does it mean for an oyster?

Juan: Yeah, so we have adult broodstock oysters, they're about that big, and we breed them here in the hatchery to produce oyster larvae.

That oyster larvae will eventually set and will produce oyster seed for nurseries.

And the purpose of the hatchery is to produce one oyster single set on a piece of shell to be put out on a plate in a market.

Pam: Wow, that's so cool.

I can't wait to see what's going on here.

Juan: Let's go.

Pam: Cool.

Juan: Hey, I just step in here.

Pam: Okay.

♪♪♪ Juan: Welcome inside the hatchery, Pam.

Pam: Oh, thank you.

It feels pretty warm in here, Juan.

Juan: Yeah, totally.

Pam: What's going on?

Juan: Well, what we do here is oyster larvae when they're so young, they like the water to be a lot warmer, so we heat it up to about 23 degrees Celsius in here.

Pam: How much is that in terms of degrees Fahrenheit?

Juan: It's about 73 ish.

So oyster larvae, the first month of their life, they're free swimming.

Pam: Wow, free swimming which is so unusual because if you think of an adult oyster, they're not free swimming.

Juan: Yeah, right.

Yeah, so the first month of their life when they're born, they're actually swimming around.

So we keep 'em in tanks like you see on that wall over there.

And they go through different growth phases.

They actually start looking like letter Ds, they're flat on one side, round on one side.

Eventually, they develop a little black spot, and that little black spot is an indicator telling us that they're about ready to set on something.

And they'll have a foot and they'll be walking around with their foot looking for a place to set.

So in the wild, they'll be in the water column and they'll set on piers, rocks.

Pam: Anything solid.

Juan: Now we can't really put a big reef on someone's plate in a restaurant for them to chisel out and eat.

So the purpose of the hatchery is to produce one single oyster to set on one grain of sand that we crush here so that we can get single set oysters.

Pam: Wow, and if I look into these buckets, Juan, it looks I can--I mean, how would I--how would you ever count these?

Juan: It's pretty intense.

Yeah, it's pretty dense in there.

Pam: How many are in these buckets?

Juan: Yeah, so there is about 2.3 million on 1 bucket, 6 million in the other bucket.

And we basically just use math to count these.

We have sharpie markings that say there's 15 liters of water in here.

So you know how much water is in there.

So you grab a little papeda and you take a 1 ml sample out of there.

Out of that 1 ml sample-- Pam: That's 20 drops everybody too, 20 drops.

Yeah, it's pretty small.

Juan: It's pretty small.

You take that over to the microscope and then count how many oysters are in 1 ml of this 15-liter sample.

Once you get that, you can multiply it out and figure out your total number in that bucket.

Pam: That's great, 'cause I can't imagine with all these guys moving around how you would ever count that many.

Juan: It's pretty hard.

Pam: Yeah, it's pretty hard.

So that's cool.

Juan: Yeah.

So yeah, once they're getting to that kind of later stage of their free swimming life, we will harvest them, we use screens like this to kind of screen them out so that we get a certain size, because once they get bigger and bigger, they'll--the size will get bigger and bigger.

And once they reach a certain size, that's when they're gonna be ready to set on something.

Pam: Juan, you're saying this is a screen?

Juan: Yeah, you can barely see that stuff, right?

I know there's-- Pam: Can I lift this?

Juan: Yeah, you can lift this.

The number is actually on the bottom there.

Pam: One hundred.

Juan: One hundred.

Pam: What does that mean?

Juan: So that means 100 microns, 0.1 of a millimeter.

So really, really tiny animals.

Pam: Wow, so, so tiny.

Juan: Totally.

We put 'em into that.

Pam: So the teenier ones would go through and then this, you'd be like, oh, they're bigger, so we're gonna keep these guys.

Okay, I got it.

Juan: Yeah, so we can separate 'em by size, make sure they're all kind of growing within the same uniform size so that they're all healthy and not out competing each other.

male announcer: "Field Trip Trivia."

Number Woman: How small is a micrometer also known as a micron?

Is it 1/10 of a meter?

1/1,000 of a meter?

Or c. 1/1,000,000 of a meter?

The answer is c. 1/1,000,000 of a meter.

Pam: How small is a micron really?

The diameter of a human hair is about 40 microns, a human blood cell is 7 microns, a spider web is 3 microns, a bacterium is 1 micron, and a virus is 100 nanometers or 0.1 microns.

That's really small.

Juan: So when we harvest the oysters that are ready to set, and we put 'em in the system with that sand-- Pam: Can I just ask you again?

Or just remind me.

Setting means you're setting on one single grain of sand if you're an oyster?

Juan: They're actually like, take that foot of theirs and they'll wrap it around, they'll feel it.

If they don't like it, they'll toss it aside and they'll go to the next one.

And then once they're one millimeter in size, that's when we pack 'em up and ship 'em over to the nursery.

They'll be introduced to unfiltered water, Humboldt Bay at that point.

Pam: Where there's more nutrients, where the nutrients are.

But at this point, are they needing--are you feeding them?

Juan: Yes, I'm constantly feeding them and giving them new water and everything.

So what's happening here, they're inside this container, right?

In that container, there's a screen on the bottom.

That screen is a specific size so that nothing falls through, right?

But what's happening is water is coming in from the bottom and all the oysters are in that oyster bed on the bottom and when water goes through, they're eating, eating, eating, and then water will go out through this port and then out this way.

Pam: Oh, I see and there's the water coming out.

Oh, cool.

Juan: So that's upwelling.

Pam: Oh my goodness.

Juan: Coming from the bottom upwelling through them and then out the side.

Pam: So they need the flow just like they would get in the bay?

Juan: Totally.

Pam: They need the movement of water.

Juan: Yeah, high water exchanges results in healthy growth.

Pam: That makes sense.

It's really humid in here.

The smell in here, it smells like I was at a pool.

It smells a little bit of chlorine.

Juan: Yeah, you know, we are in aquatic environment.

In an aquatic environment, bacteria can jump around fairly quickly.

So we've gotta make sure that our oysters have clean tanks, that there isn't any heavy bacteria buildup.

Pam: That makes sense, 'cause if there was, I mean of this many six million could be wiped out potentially anyway.

Juan: Pretty easily with how small they are.

Yeah, and all the water that we pump out of Humboldt Bay gets filtered down and UV sterilized, which means also that we're stripping all the food that Humboldt Bay has available to them, so we have to make our own food here.

Pam: Make your own food?

Juan: Yeah, totally.

Pam: Can you show me that?

Juan: I can, yeah.

Pam: Okay, cool.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Juan: Well, welcome to the algae greenhouse, Pam.

Pam: This is amazing.

What the heck is all this?

Juan: Pretty cool, huh?

Yeah, so this is where we grow all the food that the oysters are eating.

They're single celled organisms that split, split, divide, divide, divide.

They get denser, denser, denser, and they take up the volume that they're in, and they're eating all the nutrients that we're giving them.

So they take nitrates, phosphates, very similar to terrestrial plants.

These are all aquatic plants.

Pam: So photosynthesis is happening in here, and to me it looks like they're brown, but is there a green part to that?

Maybe, go ahead.

Or do they have pigments that are brown?

Juan: They kind of change colors as they grow and as they get denser and denser and denser, they get more of this darker brown color.

We have some green, some yellow, but as they grow they kind of all end up this color.

I see.

So we have an algae lab where we start in little small 250 ml flasks.

Once those get dense, we'll use that mother culture to start a daughter culture, which is a one-liter flask.

So we'll use a little bit of that water, pour it into a little clean sea water flasks with nutrients in there that'll grow.

Once that grow, we'll start a big carboy 15-liter jug.

And once that dense enough, we'll bring it over to the greenhouse and start one of these algae bags.

These bags, they're constantly harvesting.

Pam: Oh, they're harvesting the algae?

Juan: Yeah.

Pam: Oh, the little algae that are coming down, sure.

Juan: Yeah, and we're constantly putting in new water.

So there's always water exchanges going on, this water then comes down into this tank.

Yeah, now in this tank-- Pam: Oh my gosh.

Juan: Each of this rack has these little pH probes where the water goes and the pH of that algae is being read.

Pam: And so this is gonna fill up to 2,800 liters?

Juan: Ish, yeah.

It'll fill up once we're ready to kind of pump some algae out of there, we'll turn the pump on and start feeding algae to the oysters in the hatchery.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Juan: All right, Pam.

Well, that's it for the hatchery.

This is Lucas, he'll take you over to the nursery.

Pam: Thanks so much, Juan, had a great time.

Juan: No problem.

Pam: Nice to meet you, Lucas.

Lucas Sawyer: Nice to meet you.

Juan: Bye.

Pam: See you.

Lucas: We're gonna go take a look at the nursery, which is where we grow oysters from 2 to 24 millimeter.

Pam: Whenever you get near a large body of water like Humboldt Bay, you should come prepared with a personal flotation device.

So I'm gonna put one on right now.

♪♪♪ Lucas: This is the upweller barge.

This is the first stage when oysters leave the hatchery.

This is where they come to begin their residence out here on the dock.

So here's the larger size, the--these are about ready to transfer.

This is about a four-millimeter.

Pam: Lucas, these are big compared to the other ones.

Lucas: They're a little bit bigger.

You can actually see the--what an oyster looks like.

I mean, this one is beyond a four-millimeter at this point, but they start to get these stripes on them.

Pam: Oh, neat.

Lucas: And that's them interpreting their food.

They'll actually eat phytoplankton, and the colors that you see in the striping is whatever plankton they're eating, kind of translates to that color.

Pam: So there's actually live animals in this like in that little section there?

Lucas: Yep.

Pam: And is that the thing they use to stick onto stuff?

Lucas: Yeah, so you can really--you can look-- Pam: Umbo.

Lucas: The umbo, yeah.

You can look at the point of this and see the very start of this seed, and then as it grows out, it's almost like the rings of a tree.

When we want to know how many oysters are in each silo, we like to get an average count of the per milliliter count.

So we're gonna take this graduated cylinder, we're gonna measure out ten milliliters three times and then we're going to count each pile of oysters.

We're gonna get our average, and then we're gonna times that by the total amount of liters that we have in this silo.

Pam: Okay.

Lucas: You're gonna take some oysters, you're gonna put it in this graduated cylinder just like that until you reach about ten milliliters.

Pam: Okay, and ten milliliters of oysters.

Wow.

Oh yes.

You serious?

Okay, good.

Now what should I do?

Lucas: So now you're gonna take this and you're going to-- Pam: Get rid of the water.

Lucas: Get rid of the water, and then that will dump out onto the-- Pam: Sweet.

Okay, I think I understand now.

Yep, all right.

Perfect.

All right, fill it the same way.

Lucas: We only have the best equipment here.

Pam: Yes, absolutely.

Hey, if it works, that's what matters.

Lucas: It does work.

Pam: Okay.

Oysters not hurting if they're--I'm dropping.

Lucas: No, they're fine.

Pam: Okay, cool.

Lucas: That shell protects 'em from a lot of that.

Pam: Okay, sweet.

Lucas: Especially as they get bigger which they're doing.

Pam: Let's call that good, and I'll make the water come out and dump them.

Oh, I just discovered something.

Just probably do it when there's more water in it.

Lucas: Yep.

Pam: Okay, cool.

Lucas: If you need to get more out, you can pull-- Pam: Oh yeah, sure.

Of course, I can.

Of course, I can.

Thank you for-- Lucas: There you go.

Pam: Logic.

Oh, stay here, stay here.

Okay.

Lucas: So it's a-- Pam: Oh yeah, yeah.

Drain and then, so there's just a little bit of water.

Lucas: So you can kind of get them to-- There you go.

Perfect.

Pam: Okay, sweet.

And again, one more time.

Lucas: One more time.

Pam: Okay.

Oh, man.

Does it matter if I pour water on 'em?

Lucas: No, no.

Fine.

Pam: Cool.

Lucas: I just did that.

I just rinsed them, so that's why they're dry right there.

Pam: Oh, very nice.

Okay, here we go, guys.

Now I kind of get why you put more water in there too, yeah, yeah.

Lucas: If you turn it over a couple times, you can start to see 'em-- yep, there you go.

Pam: Oh, I got it.

I totally get--oh, I get it when all of them.

Oh, which I sorted.

Lucas: There you go.

Pam: Oh, I got it.

Okay, cool.

So I now have three piles?

Lucas: Yes.

Pam: All right.

Lucas: Now you count how many is in each pile and-- Pam: Okay, so here goes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7... ...45, 46, 47.

Lucas: Forty-seven.

Pam: Okay, cool.

So each of these piles has ten millimeters of oysters, but there isn't the same number in each pile.

This one had 47 oysters, this one had 52, and this one had 58.

So we need to find out what the average is Lucas: And then we'll times it by the total amount of liters in this silo, which is 4.7.

Pam: This is a job for Number Woman.

♪♪♪ Number Woman: Pam, I do wonder how many oysters are in a 4.7-liter silo.

Let's figure it out.

So we know that we have 47, 52, and 58 oysters in each of the 10-milliliter piles.

And it's easier if we make a unit rate and divide each of those 47 oysters, et cetera, by the 10 milliliters, which makes 4.7, 5.2, and 5.8.

And if we wanna find an average, we're gonna add them up and divide by the number of piles we have.

So we add them all up and divide by three.

Well, 5.2 plus 5.8, 5, 10, 11 plus 4.7 is 15.7.

If we take 15.7 and divide by 3 on a calculator, what we get is about 5.2.

And that's rounded oysters per milliliter.

And then what we know is that if we have 4.7-liter silo, what we can take is turn that into milliliters.

So what we do is we're gonna multiply that 4.7 by 1,000, which is three decimal places.

So we get 4,700 milliliters of oysters or milliliters in that silo, but we wanna find out how many oysters are in the silo instead.

So all we need to do is just to convert that.

So we take our 5.2 oysters per milliliter unit rate times 4,700 milliliters, and then the milliliters cancel and we get about 24,440 oysters in a silo.

Wow, that's a lot of oysters, and back to you, Pam.

Pam: Thanks, Number Woman.

Lucas: These are flupsy bins, what we're walking by right now.

Pam: Flupsy bins.

Lucas: So if the upweller silo was square and larger, that's what we're looking at here.

So they have a screen on the bottom, these are upside down, so normally they sit right side up.

Pam: It looks like some things grow on it too.

Lucas: That's a good old-fashioned fouling, they call it.

Pam: Oh, which needs to be hosed off-- Lucas: Pressure washed.

Pam: Pressure washed off.

Lucas: Pressure washed this off.

Pam: Sure, it makes it so it doesn't work as well.

Lucas: Basically, yeah.

Will clog the screen and so water will get through a lot slower and the oysters won't get as much food, so, yeah, we-- Pam: It's probably constant for you, guys.

Lucas: Constant cycling.

Pam: There are so many different organisms in this bay.

Lucas: Yes.

You're watching the screening or grading process.

They actually take one of those bins of oysters, they put it in a cart, you can see over there.

That cart slides into this bin dumper, they pick that up, and then the bin dumper actually has a gate on it that you can control the flow of oysters dropping onto this shaker sorter.

Pam: Oh, cool.

So I noticed there are some coming off on the right and some on the left.

So those are different sizes?

Lucas: Yes, let's take a little trip to the end of the flip tube.

Pam: All right, sounds good.

Lucas: So there you go.

There's--it's about the biggest size we grow.

So this is--and you can grab some of those if you want.

Pam: Sure.

Oh, sweet.

Lucas: Watch your fingers they are a little sharp.

Pam: Okay, they're a little sharp.

Lucas: Part of what we're doing with the screening and the rinsing and you'll get this shell, it gets really thin on the outside so it will like actually peel off.

The more we do that, the rounder and thicker the oyster will be, so that screening process, and when we pull these bins up and rinse them, that's all part of keeping these things uniform and healthy and so it's the actual nurture as opposed to nature.

If you wanna come down here, I'll-- Pam: I would like to, thank you.

Lucas: Yep, you're good there.

Just step on back and-- Pam: Step on back.

I can stay here.

Lucas: Just press up.

Pam: Cool.

Oh my gosh.

Wow.

Lucas: You can see all the--all right, go ahead and stop.

If you wanted to, you can rinse.

Pam: Oh, I'd love to rinse.

Lucas: So I would just put this thing over your shoulder like that.

Pam: Okay, should I put this over here maybe?

Okay, all right.

Over my shoulder.

Got it.

Okay, holy mackerel.

This is cool, but yeah.

Lucas: And then-- Pam: It's windy.

And then?

Lucas: So you can open the flow up.

Pam: Open the flow Lucas: Like that.

Pam: Oh my goodness.

Lucas: And then keep a hold of that thing, 'cause, you know--there you go.

Pam: That's so cool.

Oh my--ah, we got air in the line.

[pressure washing] [pressure washing] Pam: That looks very clean.

Lucas: Yeah.

Pam: Thanks for showing me around, Lucas, I learned so much.

Lucas: Thanks for coming by.

Pam: Appreciate it.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Pam: Oh my gosh.

Everything is out of the water.

Don't oysters need water to live?

Warren Moax: Yeah, they do.

We probably grow on the highest area that anyone does in Humboldt Bay.

So this is a really high area to grow oysters.

We have about a three-foot tide right now, and that's coming up to, I believe it's a 7.8 this afternoon.

Pam: That's pretty high.

Warren: So it will come in pretty quick.

And so we might see--within the hour, we might see the water hit the bottom of the baskets here.

Pam: We live in an area where there are a couple of tides a day, and what that means is the moon's gravity controls the water as it comes in and goes out.

It comes in through the bay's entrance, and then it fills the bay, and then it goes out through the same entrance and it goes down.

And so that happens twice a day.

So we get a high and a low and a high and a low.

They're not exactly the same height, but that's how it works.

And it's all because the earth is rotating going round and round and the moon's gravity is pulling on the water, it's pulling on the land too, but it pulls harder on the water 'cause the water is more able to move than the land.

Warren: The Humboldt Bay is such a productive bay and we have to deal with.

Lots of other organisms growing too, so there's competition for all that food and a lot of that out is barnacles.

So, yeah.

So these are Kumamotos, so I believe that these were stocked around that 600 oysters per basket.

Just be careful, they're really sharp edges.

Pam: Oh yeah, okay.

Warren: So, but they've grown quite a bit, so-- Pam: Oh, yes.

Look at the barnacle on this guy.

Warren: Yeah, so these had been in our nursery for about two years, so-- Pam: Okay, so that makes sense.

Warren: A little longer than we would've liked them to be in a flupsy.

Pam: Sure.

So what you're telling me here also is this is a giant experiment and you guys are working to figure out what is the most ideal thing.

Warren: Right, this is all new for us, so we thought that we would get less growth with them having less water time, but now we're seeing that they're still growing really fast, so there's a lot of food availability up here-- Pam: That's very good.

Warren: --algae.

So that was like the original size that we planted.

Is about that.

You can see the growth rings.

Pam: Yes.

Warren: And then they--this summer they really shot and grew a lot.

So you can see that there.

That was the size when we planted it.

announcer: "Field Trip Trivia."

Number Woman: What is the largest oyster ever recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records?

Is it a.

10.3 centimeters, b.

35.5 centimeters, or c. 82.1 centimeters.

The answer is b.

35.5 centimeters.

♪♪♪ Pam: Warren, what brought you to this industry?

It's very interesting.

Warren: I came up to this area to go to Humboldt State University and study fisheries.

I ended up just applying off of our college job site to an oyster farm.

I had no idea what I was getting into, became a whitewater rafting guide.

So I changed my major from fisheries to recreation, and I got a real job at an electric supply warehouse, which I hated.

So I came back to oysters, which Ted Kipper had sold his business to Taylor Shellfish.

So I worked for Taylor Shellfish, which is just a couple docks down for quite a while actually, and then I came over to Hog when they brought their flupsy up here, their nursery.

So from there I ended up trying commercial fishing for a little bit.

Went crabbing did a little bit of long lining, and when COVID hit, that wasn't really working out.

So I came back to the oyster industry again, worked for Taylor Shellfish again, and then I got offered the farm manager position here, and now I'm back at Hog.

So I've bounced around quite a bit.

Pam: What a diverse background.

But that's so cool, isn't that how life goes, it's a journey and you just don't know until--and then things open up that you'd never expected.

Warren: Yeah, so I tried a few different things, but ended up--and it's interesting 'cause I never would've thought I would've been an oyster farmer.

Pam: I never would've thought I would be a science teacher, to be honest with you.

So it's pretty cool how we change and it--things up.

We get different opportunities and it's wonderful.

Yeah, so cool.

Warren: I think that's the way it goes for a lot of people, so-- Pam: I do too.

Well, this was really fascinating.

Thank you so much, really appreciate your time and-- Warren: Yeah, glad we could show you what we do out here.

Pam: Yeah, thanks again.

Warren: Yeah, you're welcome.

Pam: All right, cool.

♪♪♪ male: Heather, I want you to wave at Lucas and scream hello or yell hello.

Pam: Hello.

male: Awesome, thank you.

Need help, Pam?

Pam: No, I think it's more funny if I don't have help.

Whoa.

male: And action.

Pam: You're watching "Field Trip."