In the Etang de Thau, the World is your oyster

Stretching between Agde and Sète, this 75,000 hectare lagoon provides a unique marine environment

Etang de Thau - not a romantic title, but this 75,000 hectare lagoon on the Languedoc coast hides a watery world of mystery. Forget the surrounding beaches and the yacht races. Here, the steamy action is beneath the surface.

This is shellfish capital of France. Over 800 shellfish farmers take advantage of the étang’s unusual ecology. The water is warm and protected from storms by a long coastal sandbank. Oxygenated fresh water enters from the Canal du Midi and several small rivers. It’s an ideal environment for the phytoplankton which shellfish eat. There’s no better place to be a mollusc.
  
It’s easy to think of oysters and mussels as not particularly bright individuals who just sit around in their shells waiting for something to happen. Then I went to meet Stéphane Saez, a go-ahead oysterman from Marseillan. Well, he shocked me, I can tell you...

Here lies a story of sex, promiscuity, babies, childhood, adolescence and then more sex again. Right under our noses these simple little critters are off down the disco with the ecstasy and...well...you know...doing it. 

Well, OK, I was lying about the sex to get your attention.

Oysters are hermaphrodites, being both male and female but not at the same time. Females secrete eggs and the males sperm into the water where some of them find each other. Only 3 or 4 eggs in 20 million are fertilised and become adults.

Within a day there’s a swimming larva which will grow a small foot and a shell over the next 3 weeks, becoming a miniature adult.

The heavy young oyster falls to the bottom and searches for a solid support, hopefully the oyster bed or better a still, an adult oyster. Junior then glues his foot to the new found support.

After 6 months in this nursery, Stéphane will collect the youngsters and and attache them 10cm apart to ropes so that they have space to grow over the next 18 months. 

Thanks to the étang’s warm water and plentiful nutrients, oysters grow to adulthood in only 2 years, half the time of their relatives on the Atlantic coast. Some babies are brought in from there, though, to genetically refresh the stock.

Ifremer, a government agency samples the water continuously at 10 stations around the lagoon and rigorously controls hygene in production centres like Stéphane's.

Mussels have a similar story but they’re grown in a cunning double tubular netting. Baby mussels are reared in a degradable inner lining. These growing youngsters then punch their way through this netting prison and move into the larger tube which will be their permanent home.

Increasingly, shellfish farmers seek to improve their margins by selling direct to the consumer. Stéphane has his own production facility and now a restaurant, La Grande Bleue.


Stéphane Saez welcomes visitors to his shellfish farm for a guided tour (€7) and restaurant near Marseillan (Telephone 06 60 82 20 60, http://www.conchyliculture.com/visite.htm).