The oyster trade worldwide is of huge commercial importance, and the demand for high quality oysters is rising all the time. With wild stocks depleted, the ever-increasing multi-million dollar oyster farming industry is serving this demand. Oyster Culture is a thorough review of the subject, providing a huge wealth of practical and commercially vital information of importance to all those involved in this expanding industry. Based on a lifetime's work in the industry, George Matthiessen has written a much-needed and comprehensive book covering all major aspects of the subject. The book covers the biology, distribution, husbandry and disease of cultured oysters and looks in detail at recent developments in oyster culture as well as considering the limits to oyster production. Separate chapters deal in detail with a) oyster culture in the Far East, the Indo-Pacific Region, Western Europe, North America and tropical areas and b) a history of production methods by a New England-based oyster company. This important book will be a vital tool and reference work for all those involved in the culture of oysters, including oyster farm managers and workers; biologists working on oysters and other bivalve shellfish and invertebrates; regulatory personnel and all those serving the industry, including personnel in aquaculture equipment and feed companies. Copies of the book should also be available in libraries of universities, research establishments and government laboratories where aquaculture is studied or taught. George C. Matthiessen PhD, has for 30 years been President of Ocean Pond Corporation, Fishers Island, New York, U.S.A.

In The Oyster Question, Christine Keiner applies perspectives of environmental, agricultural, political, and social history to examine the decline of Maryland’s iconic Chesapeake Bay oyster industry. Oystermen have held on to traditional ways of life, and some continue to use preindustrial methods, tonging oysters by hand from small boats. Others use more intensive tools, and thus it is commonly believed that a lack of regulation enabled oystermen to exploit the bay to the point of ruin. But Keiner offers an opposing view in which state officials, scientists, and oystermen created a regulated commons that sustained tidewater communities for decades. Not until the 1980s did a confluence of natural and unnatural disasters weaken the bay’s resilience enough to endanger the oyster resource. Keiner examines conflicts that pitted scientists in favor of privatization against watermen who used their power in the statehouse to stave off the forces of rural change. Her study breaks new ground regarding the evolution of environmental politics at the state rather than the federal level. The Oyster Question concludes with the impassioned ongoing debate over introducing nonnative oysters to the Chesapeake Bay and how that proposal might affect the struggling watermen and their identity as the last hunter-gatherers of the industrialized world.