BIOLOGY OF THE OYSTER-GROUNDS OF SOUTH CAROLINA. 
345 
IV.— GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE BOTTOM AND ITS LIFE. 
If we exclude the mud layer that has been referred to as often forming the 
stream basins throughout the State, the character of the bottom adapting it for 
oyster-culture is in no way remarkable. Hard mud, sandy, shelly, or coarse gravelly 
bottoms occur in more or less extended tracts in all the waters of the State — a prac- 
tical question that has already been discussed in the topographical report.* In these 
favored tracts plant and animal life are extremely abundant and every condition is 
favorable for the growth and reproduction of the food of the oyster. Some small tracts 
will be found covered with a low growth of red seaweeds, whose fronds, teeming with 
minute organisms, are the natural nurseries of the oyster’s food. These seaweed 
localities may usually be regarded as among the best of places for oyster-planting, 
especially where rapid fattening is desired; since, as a rule, they mark the most bene- 
ficial conditions of bottom, current, warmth of water, and feeding. 
V.— THE FOOD OF THE SOUTH CAROLINA OYSTER. 
Success in oyster-culture depends to a very great extent upon the feeding condi- 
tions that the oyster can obtain. The French culturists have long shown that oysters, 
like fowls, should be well fed if they are to be marketed. They have demonstrated 
in the use of the still pond ( claire ), how to provide the best conditions for a profusion 
of food organisms as the surest aid to the rapid and tasteful conditioning of the 
oyster. The claire is shown to be a marine hotbed for the minute plants preyed npon 
by the oyster. It is a pond, shallow and well warmed, almost currentless, whose salt 
water is kept uniformly tempered by fresh streams, whose bottom is so disposed that 
sediment, otherwise often fatal, will deposit naturally in trenches, and not over the 
prolific beds of oyster-food organisms. It has been shown that, under favorable con- 
ditions of feeding and living, an oyster may become of marketable size and quality 
in one-third of the time required under its natural (i. e., undomesticated) conditions. 
Undomesticated oysters are accordingly dependent to a large degree for their thrifti- 
ness upon the amount of food their natural surroundings afford. 
In the United States but little attention has yet been directed to examining the 
food conditions offered by different localities as a natural aid to oyster-culture. We 
are apt to look upon all salt waters as offering far and wide the same essential feeding 
conditions. We forget that streams in different regions differ widely in their water 
composition, rate of current, shallowness, and warmth, and that thns one, favorably 
circumstanced, might far surpass its neighbors in its general fitness for oyster-culture. 
In the studies of the Carolina waters it has therefore been deemed important not 
merely to state the natural characters of the oyster -bearing waters, but also to com- 
pare, as carefully as possible, the general and especially the feeding conditions of all 
the localities of the State examined. Comparisons of value might then be drawn with 
the natural conditions known to maintain in profitable northern oyster- grounds. 
* An investigation of the coast waters of South Carolina with reference to oyster-culture. By 
John D. Battle. Bull. U. S. Fish Commission, 1890, pp. 303-330. 
