France is in the second year of an oyster plague reports the Telegraph.Nobody knows what’s killing almost 90 percent of young oysters.
“Producers in Normandy are so worried that last month they handed out free boxes of the shellfish near Caen chanting: “Take these oysters, they may be the last you’ll ever eat
The deaths have come in two waves. The first, in May, hit the Mediterranean – including Corsica and the Etang de Thau, a salt-water lake near Montpellier – and also the west coast in the bay of Arcachon. The second struck oyster farmers all the way as far as Normandy.
Immediately the cry – global warming. But thirty years ago, the native european “portugese” oyster, small and instensely briny was wiped out for commercial purposes by a virus. Now, the “creuse” from the pacific is being farmed. oyster farms in Europe have been restocked with the Pacific “creuse” oyster from Japan and British Columbia.
