The Oyster’s Secret

One species of
edible oysters

Any number of movie writers have used the plot device of a person eating at a restaurant and finding a pearl in their oyster.  If the screenwriters had consulted marine biologists, those scientists would have disappointed them by explaining that those species of oyster people eat do not include the mollusks that produce pearls. The idea of such a find is appealing, however -- like a winning lottery ticket from Nature herself!  But this source of new-found wealth would come in the form of a small luminescent sphere.

The 20th-century novelist John Steinbeck cautioned against that appeal in The Pearl, a book that was assigned reading when I was in middle school.  The school's decision to require our reading that novella probably lay in its small size and obvious moral:  Greed over material possession can cause people to damage what is truly valuable -- human relationships and love.  Human beings have now figured out how to artificially induce the growth of "cultivated" pearls.  We have not, however, figured out how to get rid of human greed.

There can be another reason for appreciating mollusks:  for food, as many oyster lovers know. Oysters even come with a running gag to make eating them more entertaining.  Namely, the joke that it was a brave man who ate the first oyster.  (I myself very much appreciate the first man or woman who learned how to batter and fry oysters prior to their being served.)  Many people repeat that "brave man" joke without knowing that it originated with the 18th-century Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels.

Although the oyster's secret might seem to be a possible pearl hidden within, it is really no secret that pearls are now usually cultivated.  What is a secret is not what might lie within an oyster, but where oysters lie.  Where they now lie "at rest," so to speak.  And what that speaks about humankind.

The walrus and the carpenter --
whose oysters had fictional legs

That secret lies underwater in middens, old refuse heaps from human cultures.  Those underwater heaps,  which are on coastal areas throughout the world, besides containing bones, contain oyster shells -- evidence of how oysters were an important source of dietary protein and minerals to Neolithic cultures twelve thousand years ago. One midden in Maine, mostly oyster shells, was over 30 feet deep and over 1,300 feet wide.  Although in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass the comic walrus and carpenter tempted the oysters to come out for a walk on the beach so that they could be eaten, oysters had the benefit to humans of being food that could neither run away nor counterattack.  As such, oysters would have sustained human life over precarious times.

Without eyes or an obvious head, and given their inability to run away, it can be easy, I think, for us to forget that oysters are animals, as are we. Oysters live; they breathe; they reproduce. They are another testimony to evolution's ingenuity.  Moreover, although there may not be a pearl within that rugged lump of seeming rock, for ancient humans, there was a source of life within.

~~~

Imagine people gathering oysters thousands of years ago.  Does anything come to mind?

(The photo of oysters is by Myrabella

and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

(The illustration of walrus and carpenter is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.)