One adage that many agree on is that oysters should not be consumed in months that don’t contain the letter “r” in their names. This idea likely dates back to 1599 when it appeared in an English cookbook, according to a New York Times article written in 2017 by science journalist Joanna Klein. There is merit to this, said AgCenter and Louisiana Sea Grant food safety specialist Evelyn Watts.

“We know that vibrio is more prevalent in warmer months,” Watts said. “But the fact is vibrio can occur at any time of the year, and eating raw or undercooked oysters always presents a foodborne risk.”

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, vibrio is bacteria that lives in coastal waters and is present in higher concentrations between May and October when the water is warmer. It causes vibriosis, which the CDC estimates causes 80,000 illnesses and 100 deaths in the United States annually.

In addition to the greater risk of contracting vibrio, oysters are simply less appetizing in warmer months, which is when they spawn, La Peyre said.

“Oysters reproduce in the warmer months, so they are full of gametes,” she said, “while in the winter, they are ‘fat’ and growing and tend to be sweeter.”

Former oyster fisherman and current soft-shell crab producer Daniel Edgar, of Franklin, said refrigeration techniques have aided in oysters being consumed year-round in many coastal regions, where they don’t have to travel as far to market.

(right)Daniel Edgar is a former oyster fisherman who now specializes in soft-shell crab production.V. Todd Miller/LSU AgCenter Photo Credit

“Way back when, oyster harvesters didn’t have to keep a cooler on their boat,” Edgar said. “Today, any boat that spends the night offshore or the boats that fish far away, like south of Marsh Island, have to keep one on board. This was legislated to better protect the consumer.”

Edgar also said farm-raised oysters are easier to produce now than perhaps ever before with the right setup. Essentially all that is needed is enough brackish water and room to grow.

“There’s a guy in Grand Isle that sells oyster spats,” he said. “If you put 500 in a box when they’re young, in about a month they won’t fit in that box anymore, so you’ll have to divide them up into boxes of 250 and so on.”

Edgar and today’s oyster fishermen owe a lot to those credited with developing the commercial oyster industry in Louisiana: Croatian immigrants. LSU English professor Carolyn Ware, who specializes in folklife, wrote in Folklife in Louisiana about the history of Croatians in the state.

“Many of Louisiana’s Croatian men continue to fish oysters, and some are third- or fourth-generation oystermen,” Ware wrote. “Sons often start fishing with fathers on weekends and summers as children. As adults, they frequently still fish on the acres once leased by their fathers.”

Things have changed a great deal economically from those early days. AgCenter and Louisiana Sea Grant economist Rex Caffey said oysters are the third-most lucrative seafood crop in the state, behind only shrimp and menhaden, which generally aren’t fit for human consumption and are used primarily for fertilizer, animal food and as bait for blue crab.

“Recently, oysters and crabs have switched places from year to year in terms of total value,” Caffey said. “But in 2018, nearly $76 million worth of Gulf oysters were harvested in the state.”

Megan La Peyre can be reached at mlapeyre@agcenter.lsu.edu.
Evelyn Watts can be reached at egwatts@agcenter.lsu.edu.
Rex Caffey can be reached at rcaffey@agcenter.lsu.edu.

Writer: V. Todd Miller at vtmiller@agcenter.lsu.edu | permalink

Lively, an associate professor in LSU’s School of Renewable Natural Resources and LSG’s fisheries specialist, began her career at LSU in 2010. She earned her Ph.D. in marine biology from the University of Delaware.

“I’m very excited to lead such a great organization and group of people,” said Lively. “Louisiana Sea Grant is not only about high-quality research; it is uniquely positioned at the integration of applied research, extension and education to solve problems for the people and communities of coastal Louisiana and beyond.”

Lively is Louisiana Sea Grant’s fourth Executive Director since the program’s establishment in 1968. She replaces Robert Twilley, professor in the LSU College of the Coast and Environment, who announced his departure from Sea Grant in December so he can concentrate on his existing research.

Louisiana Sea Grant strives to promote stewardship of the state’s coastal resources through a combination of research, education and outreach programs critical to the cultural, economic and environmental health of Louisiana’s coastal zone. Louisiana Sea Grant is part of the National Sea Grant College Program, a network of 34 university-based programs in each of the U.S. coastal and Great Lakes states, Puerto Rico and Guam.

“Barred owls are an urban wildlife species that are pretty special. There aren’t very many other owl species here other than the Great Horned Owl, the Eastern Screech and the occasional Barn Owl,” said LSU School of Renewable & Natural Resources’ Weaver Brothers Distinguished Associate Professor Sabrina Taylor, who is conducting research to gather more information about Barred Owls in the Baton Rouge area. “There are all of these little habitat fragments around the city and we want to know how Barred Owls are using them. For example, if they have a large patch of forest, do they stay in that large patch? If they inhabit a smaller patch of woods or a few trees, does the size of their home range change?”

She and colleagues at LSU are conducting a study on these large, charismatic nocturnal native birds to learn more about where they live and roam and what they do. So far, the researchers have caught and released about 50 Barred Owls in the Baton Rouge area.

“It’s really surprising to see the range in how far Barred Owls fly. There’s a lot of variation. Some of the Barred Owls that live in BREC’s Bluebonnet Swamp, for example, do not fly very far while other owls foray from one end of the city limits to the other,” said LSU PhD candidate Vitek Jirinec, who has been working on this research as a side project since 2018.

Jirinec and Taylor attach a tag that acts like a Fit Bit on an owl that tracks where it goes and when it is most active. So far, they have found that the owls tend to be the most active in the evening and the early morning just before dawn. The state-of-the-art GPS and very high frequency, or VHF, tags cost about $1,400, but the battery life is relatively short. To conserve the battery, the researchers have programmed the tags to record a GPS location only twice a day and twice a night. After a few months, the researchers recapture the owl to recover the tag, which offers a wealth of high-resolution data on the bird’s whereabouts and activity.

[left] One of the many Barred Owls that lives in the BREC Bluebonnet Swamp Nature Center in Baton Rouge. Photo Credit: John Hartgerink

So far, one Barred Owl the researchers named Ragnar made a few forays all the way from his forest home in St. Gabriel to the LSU campus, where he stayed a few days during the winter. The researchers think that when food availability in the forest is low in the winter, the owls will fly into urban areas to prey on rats and other rodents.

For this fieldwork, the researchers catch owls at night using a net and 24-foot poles usually used to catch bats. Because Barred Owls are territorial, the scientists play owl calls on speakers which will lure the Barred Owl out and into the net. Once captured, the scientists weigh, measure, collect a small blood sample, attach the tag and release it. So far, they have collected movement data on about 30 Barred Owls.

They hope to analyze the data from the tags and conduct DNA analyses from the blood samples that will help identify male and female owls.

Now and throughout the summer, Barred owlets are out of their parents’ nests and hanging out in nearby trees or even the ground because they cannot fly. However, they are still dependent on their parents to come feed them.

“People find what they think is a sick owl or chick on the ground, but it’s perfectly fine. It's just a fledged owlet hanging out until its parents’ come to feed it,” Jirinec said.

permalink | Contact: Alison Satake - LSU Media Relations, 510-816-8161, asatake@lsu.edu

As a campus leader for environmental issues, LaGrone revitalized LSU’s 4-H Club. Under her direction, the 4-H Club volunteered to clean houses and conducted a canned food drive with LSU’s food pantry following the havoc of Hurricane Laura in 2020. She also organized socially distanced activity days for middle and high school aged youth, where students were able to participate in LSU campus tours and learn about healthy living.

This year, LaGrone also encouraged the club to focus on land subsidence in Louisiana by hosting meetings where students learn about wetland and coastal issues from short presentations paired with service events like tree and marsh grass planting to apply the new knowledge.

Through LASAL, LaGrone is completing an internship with the Applied Geoscience Department at The Water Institute of the Gulf.

“I am working with various projects including studying the habitats of gulf sturgeon, examining how crevasse cutting can influence sediment accumulation to rebuild land in the wetlands of the Delta National Wildlife Refuge and how to maintain these wetland habitats using monitoring programs, and considering how green infrastructure will impact Louisiana’s coast in the future,” said LaGrone. “Through studying data, creating models, and organizing information, I’m learning so many things about how different processes influence morphology along the coast. My degree focuses primarily on biology, so learning about geomorphology has made me appreciate the connections between the two fields and my passion for environmental issues continues to grow.”

After graduation LaGrone plans to pursue a master’s degree in environmental justice at the University of Michigan, where she hopes to gain an understanding of the causes of systemic discrimination and its connection to the environment and climate vulnerability. Then, she plans to attend the University of Florida Levin College of Law to pursue a Juris Doctor with a concentration in Environmental Law.

LaGrone aspires to have a career as an environmental lawyer specializing in climate law. She plans to work in Florida, where sea level rise has increased by six inches in the past 31 years and predictions indicate it could rise another six inches in less than 15 more years. “I hope to be on the forefront of creating the blueprint for conservation and environmental protection in the United States,” said LaGrone. “Other countries have used litigation to hold the government accountable for protecting citizens from the effects of climate change and I believe we can use litigation to protect our citizens and our natural resources too.”

Congratulations, Lexi!

permalink | Bossier Press-Tribune | 10 May 2021

If all goes as planned, 2 years from now engineers will punch a massive hole in a nearby levee that holds back the Mississippi River. A 3.5-kilometer-long canal will carry sand and muck from the muddy river into the bay, helping rebuild vast wetlands eroded by sinking land and rising seas. Over 5 decades, researchers forecast that the project—formally known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion—could move enough sediment to bury the island of Manhattan under 3 meters of muck and create at least 54 square kilometers of new wetlands. The diversion, expected to cost $2 billion, is a critical part of a much larger effort aimed at preventing coastal Louisiana, and the human and wild communities it supports, from slipping beneath the sea.

In the mid-1980s, wildlife biologist Andy Nyman (Professor, LSU School of Renewable Natural Resources) witnessed one of the first small experiments to examine whether punching a hole in a Mississippi levee could help rebuild bay wetlands. The state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries excavated gaps in land separating the river from several bays near where the river flows into the Gulf. At first, he recalls, he was unimpressed. After 3 months, there was little evidence of success. “I was like, ‘Man, this thing hasn’t done anything.’ I thought it was a tremendous waste of time.”

Twenty years later, however, Nyman, who is now at Louisiana State University (LSU), Baton Rouge, took a boat out to the area near the river’s mouth. He discovered more than 100 hectares of reeds, cattails, and seagrasses now blanketed what had been open water. “It was so cool.”

The rest of this facinating story appears in Science, 22 April 2021