- Lined with many small, thin-walled blood vessels which extract oxygen
from the water and expel carbon dioxide.
- A small, three-chambered heart, lying under the abductor muscle,
pumps colorless blood, with its supply of oxygen, to all parts of the
body. At the same time a pair of kidneys located on the underside of
the muscle purifies the blood of any waste products it has collected.
- While oysters have separate sexes, they may change sex one or more
times during their life span.
- The gonads, organs responsible for producing both eggs and sperm,
surround the digestive organs and are made up of sex cells, branching
tubules and connective tissue.
- An oyster produces a pearl when foreign material becomes trapped inside
the shell.
- Oysters are not only delicious, but they're also one of the most nutritionally
well balanced of foods, containing protein, carbohydrates and lipids.
- Because raw foods including oysters may carry bacteria, persons with
chronic liver disease, impaired immune systems or cancer should avoid
eating raw oysters.
- The oyster can clean the water it lives on!
- The oyster feeds by pumping through its body and filtering out its
food (mostly algae and detritus-decaying plant and animal matter).
- A healthy market-size (3 inches or larger) oyster can filter 50 or
more gallons of water a day.
- Oysters can change gender. Usually, they are male first, turning
female as they grow older. If they are bigger than 3 inches, they are
probably female.
- There are more than 400 species of oysters around the world. The ones
we catch in the Delaware Bay and along most of the East and Gulf Coasts
are Easter or American oysters, Crassostrea virginica.
- Only one oyster spat in 1,145,000 survives to adulthood.
- Oysters have been farmed since ancient Roman times. Native Americans
ate them 6,000-8,000 years ago, often smoking them over their campfires.
- Oysters bioaccumulate gold, mercury, lead, arsenic, and other toxic
metals from the water.
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