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To track the infestation, Martinelli and her colleagues have made “wanted” signs showing mud worms and their markings so that oyster growers can contact the team if they see any. But in some ways, that didn’t matter: Either can cause extensive damage. Martinelli couldn’t tell by sight whether it was caused by P. Grabbing another shell, she showed me the next and more obvious stage of infection, which resembled a small charred blister on a pizza crust. “It’s crazy how your eye gets trained.” On the inside rim, I could just make out a black pinprick that Martinelli identified as a mud-worm burrow. “Here, I don’t know if you can see those,” she said, opening a bag and shaking out a shell. Pulling open the top drawer of a cupboard, she flicked through bags of shells like folders in a file cabinet, squinting through the transparent plastic.
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Martinelli invited me to Wood’s lab to see the blisters for myself. In Puget Sound, Hood Canal, Samish Bay, and Willapa Bay, however, about three-quarters of the blisters derived from a mystery parasite, one that didn’t align with any other mud-worm species on record. websteri, which suggests species invasion. Almost all the worms from the West Coast had DNA that matched P. The Washington oysters were no exception: In parts of south Puget Sound, the infestation rate was as high as 53 percent.īut there was one difference. With careful tweezer work, the researchers pulled mud worms from 25 percent of the samples. From California to Alaska, more than 30 oyster growers and tribes offered up shells. They started by mapping the distribution of modern mud worms along the U.S.
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websteri’s past in Washington, using the structure and chemistry of oyster shells as an archive of marine conditions over time. In 2018, King, Wood, and Julieta Martinelli, a postdoctoral researcher in Wood’s lab, began a project to evaluate P. King decided to call Chelsea Wood, a University of Washington parasite ecologist. With no prior scientific reports of the parasites in Washington, though, she couldn’t tell if this was a recent invasion, or if small numbers had been here for centuries and were only now proliferating because of some change in the environment. Today, the majority of the state’s oysters are sold raw, and King knew an invasion of mud worms could upend the market. Washington, however, seemed unaffected, a half-shell haven. More recently, the parasite has been reported in Oregon, California, and British Columbia. websteri originated, but over centuries, it has hitched a ride around the world with the global oyster trade, triggering major infestations that have collapsed half-shell companies in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii. But they can curb oyster growth-and tank market value. Mud worms don’t typically kill oysters or poison the meat for humans. Behind this barrier, the worm continues digging out more space, creating a bubble that gradually fills with its own waste and seafloor sludge. In response, the oyster secretes a brittle layer of shell between itself and the invader, like an older sibling dividing a shared room. websteri makes its home by burrowing into an oyster shell and sticking its palps out into the ocean to feed. Measuring roughly three-quarters of an inch, P. The most commonly recorded is Polydora websteri. It’s common to find oyster shells in the United States, from Massachusetts to the Gulf of Mexico, marred by dark blisters and burrows-the scars of shell-boring mud worms. King had occasionally noticed these blisters during her 30-year career, but she’d never before seen so many at once. She went through 13 or 14 oysters before she finally produced a presentable half shell. “But let’s find you some better oysters.” To her embarrassment, it kept happening. “I don’t know what’s happening here,” she remembers telling her audience. King watched in disbelief as black ooze bled into raw meat. As she wedged her knife under the lip of an oyster, it split a hidden blister inside the shell. She was there to teach people about the local oyster industry, which is prized for producing delicious half shells with perfect, pearly white interiors.
It was 2017, and Teri King, an aquaculture specialist for Washington Sea Grant, a marine-research institute, had been invited to shuck shellfish at a seafood event in Shelton, Washington. This article was originally published by High Country News.Ī dozen twists of a knife were all it took to tarnish the unblemished reputation of Washington’s oysters.