CCB MEDIA PHOTO
Kahren Dowcett of the World Oyster Society.
FALMOUTH – Scientists from all over the world will descend on Falmouth this week for the 6th Annual International Oyster Symposium.
The World Oyster Society is holding the three-day event from October 21 to the 23 at Lillie Auditorium at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole on Wednesday and at the Sea Crest Beach Hotel in North Falmouth on Thursday and Friday.
World Oyster Society North and South American Chapter Director Kahren Dowcett, who is the program architect for the symposium, said the importance of the oyster cannot be overstated.
“We think of it as a keystone species,” Dowcett said. “When we think of the arch, there is that one stone without which the arch no longer stands.”
There is evidence that the oyster goes back 350 million years, Dowcett said.
“It has tremendous adaptive ability and in fact civilizations have grown up around where the oysters flourished, so we really have to look to them as a way to solve some of our environmental issues,” she said.
The mission of the symposium, she said, is “to bring together the oyster people of the world—across science, industry and culture—for the betterment of humanity and to focus on the oyster and to raise our level of awareness about its key and indispensable role in marine health and coastal protection.”
Locally, oysters are well-known not only for their culinary use but for their ability to filter nitrogen from coastal embayments.
“Happily and quite naturally, the oyster feeds on nitrogen. We can think of it as a broom of the sea. We can think of it as nature’s Brita. It’s a very, very wonderful thing that we have oysters in the water and oyster aquaculture,” she said.
To hear more from Kahren Dowcett about the 6th Annual Oyster Symposium, listen below.
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