By Marie Hughes, director of the Chambers County Museum at Wallisville
Editor’s note: The Nielsen family’s story is one of perseverance and adaptation, spanning generations along the Texas coast. From humble beginnings as Norwegian immigrants to becoming leaders in the state’s oyster industry, their legacy reflects both the challenges and resilience of life on the water. In this second installment, the story continues with the next generations who carried forward the Nelson family’s commitment to hard work, innovation, and stewardship of Galveston Bay.
How They Grow
Most oysters do not retain a fixed sex throughout their lives; they can change from male to female, and many contain both eggs and sperm. After reaching maturity — typically in about a year — they release sperm into the water, but it takes older, more mature oysters to release eggs. The sperm and eggs meet in the water and fertilize, developing into larvae within about six hours.
“Oysters spawn typically in May and June when the water starts warming up to about 75 degrees,” explained Justin Woody, vice president of Jeri’s Seafood in Anahuac, Texas. “Normally, you need some fresh water for them to start spawning — a change in salinity and temperature. We use what we call cultch, which is basically just rock or shell — anything an oyster will stick to. You put the cultch in the water, the oysters spawn, and eventually the larvae will set.
“When they first land, that’s the only time an oyster has legs. They can actually crawl around and find something to set on, and once they do, they’re known as spat. When an oyster dies, it automatically opens, and many times the larvae will set on the open shell. You might have a hundred baby oysters that attach themselves to one shell, but then the crabs, drums, and fish come through and pick off the ones they want. You might have two that survive out of a hundred or two hundred that set there. But you wouldn’t want all of them to survive because it would be way too overcrowded.
“If they don’t find something to set on, they won’t survive. But once they set, they’re there, and they start growing. You just have to have some material and the right conditions. As long as the conditions are right in the area and you have enough seed oysters spawning, you can bring an area back pretty quickly — that’s what they did in the Chesapeake Bay area. Maryland and Virginia are predominately private leases, not public waters. In public waters, you have the tragedy of the commons — when anything is public and people are released out there freely, they have no duty to protect it. They want to get as much as they can as quickly as they can before anyone else does. So public reefs, just like anything else public, are just not that efficient.
“If you invest your own money and grow your own oysters, now you’re going to take care of them and preserve them. Virginia and Maryland are a testament to how well that works. Because of their management, Texas went from being number one in the nation to being third or fourth.”
“Oysters grow their own shell, which is basically calcium carbonate,” noted Woody. Oysters feed on phytoplankton, which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use it for photosynthesis — the main food source for oysters. When oysters filter water through their gills, the phytoplankton are trapped and moved to the oyster’s mouth for digestion.
“Oysters use the carbon dioxide and calcium carbonate to build their shells. Because oysters eat phytoplankton, which has pulled CO₂ out of the atmosphere, there’s actually carbon sequestration in oysters — the shells become a geological storage for CO₂. Recently, Exxon, Chevron, and others have been taking carbon and storing it underground. They’ve leased a bunch of land in Chambers County for that purpose, but they have to monitor it forever. Oysters consume the CO₂, they build their shell, the shell becomes part of the reef, and as long as it’s not disturbed, that’s geological storage for carbon,” he affirmed.
The Luggers
Oyster boats are called luggers — a name derived from the word lug, meaning to carry or drag a heavy load. So, a lugger is something that lugs.
Richard Bricker, in his book Pearls on Galveston Bay, wrote, “Generally, the lugger will be relatively shallow draft with a flat bottom. A scow or barge-type bow is also sometimes used. This was the usual design for sailing sloops and schooners since the mid-1800s all along the Texas Gulf Coast for at least two reasons. One was that our shallow waters dictated a flat bottom to minimize the draft and distribute the load when running aground thus preventing hull damage. Another significant reason is that such a design is much easier to build, especially with wood. The scow-type bow eliminates the compound curves of a sharp bow and cuts out the need for steaming the wood and the subsequent complexities.
“Many of the early scow sloops were built right on the beach, and Joe Nelson’s steel lugger Security was built in his sister’s yard. Just a good welder, some laborers, and Joe supervising were all that was needed. Another significant difference of the true oyster lugger is a second wheel and controls forward so that the captain is facing aft such that he can see and control the dredge coming in as he dredges in a circle. The larger luggers also have bunks, a galley, and a head, which permits oystering in other areas of the Gulf Coast when needed.”
“Luggers were purposely built for oystering,” said Woody. “They’re large enough to haul shell back out into the bay. Initially, they were built large to use for transplanting oysters. Now we use them to put shell back out on the reefs and hold our coolers for refrigerating the oysters at harvest.”
The Process
“We have our own oyster boats which usually go out about five a.m. and return to the dock around noon to three, depending on how many sacks they get,” declared Woody. “We only produce about a third of what we process. We bring in the remainder from Louisiana, Mississippi, Maryland, Virginia, and everywhere, and process them.
“In our operation here, we start by planting cultch. Once you plant that, you’re going to get off it and you’re not going to touch it again because once they start growing, you don’t want to be out there with a dredge working on top of all the new oysters. They’re really fragile at that stage; you want to wait until they get at least two inches before you go out there and start dragging them around. That takes about ten to fifteen months, depending on the amount of rain and the salinity of the water.
“We have some leases that are right off the tip of Smith Point where the Trinity River feeds in. The oysters there are the first to die when the water gets real fresh, but they also grow the quickest because of all the nutrients that come down. You can grow a three-inch oyster there in about sixteen months. If you get out across the bay, it’s going to take you a full two years.
“Once you start dragging them around, you break up the clusters so you can get single oysters. You keep cultivating them like that until they reach three inches, and then we harvest them. That’s state law — they have to be three inches to harvest.
“If our customers order today, we’re going to deliver tomorrow. So once we get an order, we go out that day to harvest. Not too many people do that, and logistically, sometimes it’s very difficult because of weather and other circumstances. So we get our orders, the boats come in, and we start processing that day — and they get put on the truck and delivered the next day.”
Bringing ’Em In . . . Are Raw Oysters Safe to Eat?
“The boats do a rough cleaning of the oysters then a final cleaning is done once they arrive at the dock,” said Woody as he continued his dialog on processing the harvest. “They get bagged; most of what we sell is 100-count sacks of live oysters. Oysters that get shucked don’t get washed — there’s no sense in washing them. Basically, we take them to the oyster plant where the shuckers shuck them, put them in a bucket, and they’re weighed out and washed on the skimmer table and then graded out.
“We bring our visa guys over from Mexico around November to shuck oysters and we just sent them home last week. You can’t find Americans to do the job. A good shucker in his prime can shuck a gallon of oysters per hour, which on an average is about 200 oysters per gallon. Each shucker has ping pong balls with their number on them and they put one in each gallon they shuck as they are paid by their production.
“Based on a yearly average, we process about 300 sacks of oysters a day. We sell a variety of processed products — whole in shell and shucked. This time of year we also do irradiation on our half-shell product intended for raw consumption, which is a post-harvest process. Oysters are filter feeders and they get vibrio vulnificus, which is the same as the flesh-eating bacteria. You can get it from cutting your leg and going in the water, or you can get it from eating an oyster. We treat the oysters to reduce that to a non-detectable level which reduces that risk. It also gives it a little longer shelf life.
“We don’t do it in the wintertime because vibrio spikes in the summertime — it’s a higher-temperature bacteria. It’s pretty safe for people to eat oysters harvested in the winter. After they’re cleaned, we load them on a truck and send them to Mississippi where the radiation plant is. They treat them and send them back to us, and then they’re loaded on a truck and sent out to our customers.
“You have the leases that we plant and harvest, the boats, the processing plant, and trucking — so we have pretty much three or four different operations. One hundred percent of our deliveries are made by our own drivers in our own trucks because that’s something you cannot rely on somebody else to do. However, oysters we purchase from other places are picked up by 80% of our trucks, and the other 20% is delivered by contract people, simply because we’d have to hire more drivers and get another truck. All oysters are shipped in refrigerated trucks. All of our boats also have coolers on them. Once the oysters are harvested, they immediately go into a cooler.”
“We focus most of our distribution in Texas,” stated Woody. “We try to stay out of Louisiana because they have a large oyster industry there. Although our focus is Texas, we sell to distributors and our oysters end up all over the country — we just don’t get it there. Where it all finally ends up, I just couldn’t tell you.”
“From Virginia all the way down the East Coast they have the same type of oyster,” continued Woody. “There hasn’t been any outside influence brought in. However, the West Coast cannot import their live catch into Texas because Texas passed a law prohibiting it. The reason is the West Coast has brought in so many different varieties of oysters from all over the world that it is just a smorgasbord. The Texas law was passed to keep an invasive species from getting into our waters and taking over.”
Richard Bricker, author of Pearls on Galveston Bay, wrote in his book about an incident on June 24, 2003. He and Sammy M. Ray, a former marine biologist at Texas A&M–Galveston, were invited by Joe Nelson to go out on his lugger, Security, with a group of some thirty children who were attending Sea Camp, a program sponsored by Texas A&M University at Galveston. Many of the children had never eaten an oyster, raw or otherwise. Giving into peer pressure and curiosity, many of them ate one, especially after Sammy related that he ate them raw softly and slowly so that sometimes he could feel their heartbeat as the oyster went down. He stated their heart only beats when their shell is open.
Transplanting Oysters
In all the bays, there are restricted areas where oyster harvesting is not allowed due to the potential for pollution. In Galveston Bay, that includes the area coming out of Channelview because of the refineries, as well as areas where large drainage ditches flow into the bay.
There are open and closed areas divided by a finite line, and sometimes a public reef crosses that boundary. To discourage harvesters from crossing into restricted waters during open season — which could risk making someone sick — leaseholders were once allowed to transplant oysters. They could move oysters from restricted areas to their private leases and allow them to depurate (filter) for two weeks before harvesting.
The last transplant took place in 2014, as there is no longer a need for it.
Puttin’ ’Em Back
“My grandpa and dad started putting our oyster shells back on our leases a long time ago, and then we started buying river rock to put on top of our established reefs. Everybody else was selling their shell to companies who ground them up to make chicken feed instead of putting it back on their leases. The shell is loaded from our dock onto a barge. Each barge carries about 330 cubic yards of shell, which is around 300 tons. We use water pressure to blow the oysters off the barge and onto the reef,” explained Woody.
They use a large pump mounted on the barge that pushes 1,500 gallons per minute at 200 psi through five turret-mounted nozzles along the barge’s length.
“The timing of putting the shell out is important as well, as it is best to coincide with the onset of the larvae’s maturity,” explained Woody. “Oyster shell will eventually start decomposing, especially in higher salinity, so it turns into a shell hash. Shell hash gets moved around in the tide; a spat might stick to that, but its survival rate is not good as it will end up getting covered up and killed.
“If river rock is on top and spat attaches to it, it will not get moved away from the reef, and it also makes a prettier, rounder shell. Shell is best for the base of the reef and the river rock on top to catch the spat.”
“We shuck oysters and we sell oysters to half-shell markets. In the cages, to get a pretty half-shell oyster like you see in the restaurants, you have to go out and tumble the oysters and flip the cages over to let them air dry and kill the algae. There’s a lot of work that goes into it.
“While we’re harvesting our oysters on the bottom with a dredge or a rake, it’s naturally tumbling all the other oysters that you’re not catching, so you’re knocking the growing edge off to make them grow a deeper cup. Oysters have a growing edge, and they normally grow long and skinny, but if you knock that growing edge off, the oyster will put that energy into just growing deeper.”
The Multifaceted Benefit of Oysters
Oyster farming has a surprising number of benefits that go well beyond producing a tasty seafood. In addition to their role in natural carbon sequestration, oysters provide immense ecological value.
As filter feeders, they improve water clarity — a single oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water per day. They also provide habitat and breeding grounds for nearly every type of fish. Oysters secrete pseudo feces — particles of grit that cannot be used as food and are wrapped in mucous — which smaller fish feed on, in turn attracting larger fish.
Oysters are also important for preventing erosion. When reefs form near shorelines, they protect against wave action and erosion. Large oyster reefs can serve as natural buffers, helping shield coastal communities from storm surges and flooding. Lastly, oysters recycle nutrients, helping balance ecosystems and prevent harmful algal blooms.
Fighting for Our Future
“Our family business works because we’ve put a lot of work into it,” said Woody proudly. “Half of my job is keeping this place running and the other half is fighting for our future. Grandpa and dad spent a lot of time in Austin keeping this place going and fighting for the oyster industry, now it’s our turn.
“There are a lot of oystermen who oyster in the area and they’re here today and gone tomorrow, it’s just money to them. We live in this community, my house overlooks East Bay and my family lives and works here as well. We don’t want the oyster industry to be here just for today; we want it to be here for tomorrow as well and we’re making it.
“I spend a lot of time in Austin, I also serve on the oyster advisory committee. Starting September 1st, this year, they’re going to re-open the application for bottom leases known as COL’s or Certificates of Location. I hope they do well with that.
“I’ve been working here since I was thirteen years old. I’d get down here at four and I was either shell boy or mopping the floors, or I was going out on the boats and transplanting, and I still do all that. When you’re a small business you do what needs to be done. But like I said, I spend a lot of time now politicking to make Texas a better place for oysters. My family and I are fighting for Texas and we’re making headway. I’m happy with some of the things we’ve been able to accomplish recently,” said Justin with confidence.
With the oyster industry in the capable hands of people like Justin who are blessed with tenacity and resolve, I have no doubt the Texas oyster industry will continue to flourish — after all, our OYSTER IS THEIR WORLD!
Here is Part 1 of this series: