The boss of a seafood delicacy business has spoken of the shock he experienced harvesting a monster oyster as big as a newborn baby.
Tom Haward said he was fascinated after his company retrieved the huge mollusk, weighing 5.5lbs (2.5kg) along the coast of Mersea Island, Essex.
Mr. Haward estimates the 12 inches long and five inches wide oyster is 20 years old which makes it considerably rare as they usually only live for around six years in harvested waters.
“My first thought was ‘flipping heck’. We work with oysters all the time and see thousands upon thousands a day, but to see one like that, it was fascinating,” Mr. Haward said. “You could see the growth lines on it, just like a tree. It’s very intriguing.”
Richard Haward’s Oysters, founded in 1769, harvests around a million mollusks a year but Mr. Haward said this one was the largest he’d seen.
Positing how an oyster could live so long, the oysterman said that with 14 miles of oyster reefs, it’s always possible for an individual to be looked over.
“Some can be left growing as they keep getting missed and then they can end up around 20 years old,” he said.
Unlike other delicacies, size doesn’t confer special treatment, and if the oyster does make it to their market stall, it would be sold according to the weight of its meat, putting it at about $12.00.
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However Mr. Haward said he may put this special find up for auction with any proceeds going as a donation to a lifeboat charity.
The eighth-generation oysterman joked that the seafood delicacy weighed about the same as his daughter Autumn when she was born.
“She weighed about 6lbs, this one was 5.5lbs. Autumn loves the sea so she could be the ninth generation of Richard Haward’s Oysters,” he told the British news source SWNS.
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“We’ve been doing this for 300 years and it’s still as exciting for us as it was back then.”
The oyster is 1.5 inches (4cm) short of the largest oyster recorded by the Guinness World Records, discovered in Denmark at 13.97 inches long.
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