On the occasion of the Days of the Sea, an oyster farmer from Baden offers a two-hour walk in the heart of the Gulf of Morbihan. He presents his job and explains to visitors the different phases of oyster development.
Maryse Constantin is an oyster farmer in the Arcachon basin. She explains the difficulties and constraints of the job but also the pleasures she gets from it.
During an oyster fishing in Quiberon Bay, François Cadoret, oyster farmer, tells us about the evolution of his profession since the parasitosis of the flat oyster in 1980. After eradication work, a catch could be revived, but the majority of the spat still has to be reared in other bays. Oyster farmers then turned to the oyster, but the conditions too favorable to their development made them out of the norm, and almost unsaleable.
September in Paris. The market of the Halles receives the first oysters of the different oyster places of France. Before arriving in the capital, ready to eat, the oyster goes through several phases of development.
In the Arcachon basin, François Barnole, oyster farmer, explains the different stages of raising an oyster. The first consists in preparing tiles, called collectors, which are coated with lime where spat will appear. After a year, the collectors are scraped and the spat recovered, called stripping. Then the oysters are sown on the fly in parks. The next step is to recover the small oysters. They are put in crates, cleaned, sorted and separated then they are resected to grow before being marketed.
The oyster culture center of Arcachon is one of the most important centers of Europe: before being sent in a "train tide" in Paris, the oyster culture undergoes various phases: the embryos of oysters or spats are detached from limed tiles, spread in parks then oysters are harvested, washed, sorted.