Love Life of Oysters, Maine

Submitted as part of the Women Mind the Water Digital Stories Project.

"My name is Dagney Ernest. I live here in mid-coast Maine. I live in Thomaston now. I have also lived in Rockland. I have always been attached to the ocean. My grandfather came from Vinalhaven in Matinicus. Then he moved to Staten Island so he said the family moved from island to island. I came up right after college. I had always wanted to live here and I need to live near the ocean. And so, I have. Which is great because I can go swimming in the summer. I do my paddleboarding. Even in the winter I’ll do the polar plunges so I can taste the seawater on my lips in the middle of the winter because I miss it.

The seawater story I want to tell goes back to when I was in college. Do I have my hat on? Yes! I was at Rutgers at the time. And I was part of a, I worked as a lab tech. Actually, it was before I started school but it was for Rutgers down in a place called Bivalve, New Jersey [laughs]. One of the few places you can see the sunset on the ocean on the East Coast because of the way the land comes around. We were doing oyster larvae research which was actually funded by the petrochemical industry. So it was basically to see what components of fuel #2 would be worse for oyster larvae. Maybe they would get rid of that one. I am not sure where that research ended. But my job was to sort of be this evil nanny for the oyster larvae. Oyster larvaes are free swimming. They swim in the salt water and pick up nutrients from the salt water. Eventually, they settle in and start to make their shells. But I was taking care of the larvae. So every day I would change their sea water. I would feed them algae. And, then I would bombard them with components of fuel #2. That’s what I did. But because fuel #2 isn’t great for oyster larvae we’d lose them and we’d need more. And you get more larvae by getting oysters to spawn. And the way oysters spawn is, you know, one will start shooting something off in the water and the rest go “WOO!” And, then they all do it at the same time. But getting that first one to shoot is kind of hard. And as the season goes by they’re kind of not in the mood so much. So we noticed that they tended to spawn when the tide came in and out. We were just off the beach with our own tanks that we were filled with water from the sea. So what we would do to get them in the mood, you know, for our own sakes we thought it would be fun to put candles all around the tanks which we did. But mostly we just filled the tanks up with water and let it drain out. And fill it up, and let it drain out. Just to see if we could fool them into spawning. And every now and then it did. So that was my direct interaction with sea life very early on." 

Asset ID: 7976
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