Why did the oyster seedling industry disappear as the coastline shifted?

General News Jan 1, 1970By Emily Carter 0 views

[Report by journalists Ye Wei-jun and Wang Bo-yuan / Yunlin Taixi]

Editor's note: "Zhongzheng E-News" is an internship media outlet run by the Department of Communication at National Chung Cheng University, and also the first student internship media outlet in the country to operate as an online multimedia news platform. This report is an in-depth local investigation conducted by reporters of Zhongzheng E-News; in addition to the video version, it also includes a complete written record.

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The oyster farming industry in Taixi Township, Yunlin County has been affected by industrial development; environmental changes have made the farming environment worse than before, and the quality of the oysters produced is no longer plump and fine. The natural spat-collecting grounds have also changed along with the environment, leading to a decline in oyster production. The Marine Fisheries Research Center of the Fisheries Research Institute under the Council of Agriculture, Executive Yuan, has developed artificial oyster spat technology, but the technology is not yet mature, and the cost of artificial oyster spat is relatively high, so ordinary fishermen still cannot accept it. How the oyster industry will develop in the future remains uncertain; fishermen are pinning their hopes on finding new natural oyster grounds to keep this traditional industry going.

Length: 6 min 28 sec

Traditional oyster spat industry faces a crisis of survival

Oyster omelette has always been a highly popular cheap street food in Taiwan's night markets, but did you know? As the farming environment changes, in the future the oyster omelette may no longer be cheap, and may make you hesitate to order it, choosing other substitutes instead.

Coastal oyster farming across Taiwan is mainly concentrated in five counties: Changhua County, Yunlin County, Chiayi County, Tainan County and Penghu County, and Wugang Village in Taixi Township, Yunlin County is one of the important oyster-producing townships among them, but because the coastal shoreline has continued to recede in recent years and the ecological environment has changed, production has declined, and this traditional industry is facing a crisis of disappearance.

Local fisherman Lin Dui of Wugang Village, Taixi Township, Yunlin County, said, in the past the soil here was all very good, but after the industrial zone came, the soil here all turned into black soil, very poor.

Lin Jin-lang, chairman of the Yunlin County Shallow Sea Aquaculture Association, said, the area around the Sixth Naphtha Cracker Complex used to be a very rich fishing ground. When some elders chatted with us, they said that if a husband and wife just said they needed to pay their mutual-aid club installment the next day and were short by ten or twenty thousand dollars, the couple would go out at night, take a bamboo raft out, and they would have the installment money, so at that time the fishery resources were very abundant.

Sand dredging for land reclamation in the industrial zone changes the farming environment

The Mailiao Industrial Zone, located at the northern end of Taixi Township, as well as the later emerging industrial zones, were all built by means of sand dredging for land reclamation. Sand dredging for land reclamation not only cut off the downstream sand source, but also formed a jetty effect, changing the oyster farming environment to the south of the industrial zone.

Zhang Zi-jian, chairman of the Yunlin County Environmental Protection Union and assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Resource Management at TransWorld University, said, after the offshore industrial zone was completed, Taiwan's largest offshore sandbar, Waisanding Sandbar, which originally belonged to Yunlin County, has now moved to Chiayi, and its area has shrunk by about three quarters. The main reason is that its sand source has disappeared and replenishment is insufficient, so overall, the entire Yunlin coast, from Taixi, Sihu and Kouhu all the way to the Chiayi coast, is showing a state of erosion, and this has a very large impact on the entire coastal oyster farming industry.

Shrinking Waisanding Sandbar can hardly provide a barrier for oyster grounds

The shortage of sand sources has led to a reduction in the area of Waisanding Sandbar, making it unable to block the pounding of outside waves for the inner sea, which affects changes in the natural oyster grounds of the inner sea.

Dai Ren-xiang, associate researcher at the Taixi Experimental Station of the Seawater Propagation Research Center of the Fisheries Research Institute under the Council of Agriculture, Executive Yuan, said, in general, fishermen believe that the construction of this reclaimed land and these factories will affect the water quality, and in addition, the location of its natural spat-collecting areas will be affected by water currents, that is, it will change, so sometimes in the traditional spat-collecting areas it is not easy for them to collect the ideal spat they want, and perhaps they may need to find new places, so this will have a bad result for their spat production.

Taiwan's key oyster spat town, production affects the market

Wugang Village is different from ordinary oyster-producing and selling areas; what is produced here is oyster spat, that is, oysters in kindergarten, which are sold to Dongshi, Tainan and other places, and then raised to adult oysters before being sold.

Cai Wen-dong, section chief of the extension section of the Yunlin District Fishermen's Association, said, in an area like Taixi, there is more spat cultivation; spat cultivation is fixed-style, that is, suspended and laid flat. This is the case in Taixi, that is, spat cultivation, supplying roughly more than 80 percent of the country's oyster spat.

Zhang Zi-jian, chairman of the Yunlin County Environmental Protection Union and assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Resource Management at TransWorld University, said:

"The sand source is actually only a surface factor creating this habitat environment. What is more important is that these oysters need a nutrient source. These nutrient sources come from rivers; it is like a large umbilical cord of the land, carrying a great deal of nutrients from the inland. These nutrient sources allow the oysters, especially the seedlings, which are in a planktonic state, to grow; these plankton need these nutrient sources in order to grow and thrive."

Artificial oyster spat strings break through environmental shocks

Because the location of natural spat-collecting grounds has changed and the original nutrient supply has decreased, oysters do not grow easily and the maturation time is prolonged, affecting local fishermen's livelihoods. The Taixi Experimental Station of the Seawater Propagation Research Center of the Fisheries Research Institute under the Council of Agriculture, Executive Yuan, has also developed artificial oyster spat, attempting to bring a solution to oyster farmers.

"Natural spat is seasonal; that is, it is only produced from August to November or December, so sometimes, when its production increases greatly in a certain season, it causes an imbalance between production and sales prices. Artificial spat, on the other hand, because it can be produced all year round, in winter and in summer it can all be produced, can regulate things, that is, when natural spat is not being produced, artificial spat can be used to fill this gap, so its turnover rate, so to speak, will increase.

Another advantage of artificial spat is that it can be bred, and we can select what we need, for example, faster-growing strains, or strains with stronger disease resistance. For example, our oysters sometimes have some diseases; with natural spat you cannot deal with it, so we must select strains that can resist disease, and then all the problems can be solved."

Ding Wen-zhong, chairman of the Yunlin County Wugang Community Development Association, said:

"This artificial spat cultivation part has not yet been truly, truly promoted, so after artificial restoration, in the future it will become something scientific; this is also a trend, also a trend, because only in the future will it be enough to cope in large quantities with what we need (oyster spat). Otherwise, if you rely on nature to grow, you are controlled by it (nature), or by water quality, and you cannot grow so much (oyster spat)."

Adopt artificial oyster spat? Oyster farmers: it does not meet cost

Although there is new technology in oyster farming, oyster farmers' acceptance is still not high; farming techniques are not easy to learn, and the average age of oyster farmers is high, which affects the degree of acceptance of artificial oyster spat.

Ding Wen-zhi, chairman of the Yunlin County Wugang Community Development Association, said:

"The main thing is, can your spat cultivation technology be made public eventually, or what other measures will there be, so that the young people willing to come back to work, that is, people who want to work in this industry, have the ability to lower their costs and also have the ability to survive. The main thing is that you have a way to survive in this place, and only then is there this appeal."

Lin Jin-lang, chairman of the Yunlin County Shallow Sea Aquaculture Association, said:

"As for oyster farmers, generally they are older. If you ask them to put out so much effort, they really cannot manage it, because if they are elders, since we can even see people in their seventies or eighties still working in this area, generally speaking, here it is really just getting by. If you ask them, since they are not young people, and also not people with plans, then across the entire coastal area, given Taiwan's current environmental conditions, if you want to farm on a large scale, it may be extremely difficult."

How the oyster industry moves forward: half fate, half effort

How to continue a development history of nearly sixty years? Oyster farmers hope to find new natural spat-collecting grounds, and also hope that artificial oyster spat technology can be implemented to help local oyster farmers, so that the traditional oyster farming industry can come back to life from being a sunset industry.