Farmer in the Deep : Marine Biologist Scrapes Mussels Off Oil-Rig Legs

With hoe in hand, Bob Meek plunges into the chilly waters beneath an oil platform in the Santa Barbara Channel. Greedy Calico bass that know what’s to come swarm at his side.

Twenty-five feet below the water’s calm surface, he starts scraping mussels from the long legs of the oil platform. The bass lunge into a feeding frenzy over a bite-sized morsel dislodged from the steel tubing.

The underwater dance continues for hours as Meek rips clumps of mussels from the legs and drops them into an assistant’s net--the first step for these mollusks on the way to market.

In this underwater world, the marine biologist has become a farmer of the sea, cultivating a rare enterprise that saves oil companies money and feeds shellfish lovers from California to Chicago.

“There’s no textbook for this,” Meek said. “But it seems to be working.”

Meek helps oil companies strip their platforms of mussels and other biological buildup that can hasten metal fatigue. The added weight and bulk to the legs magnify the pounding they take from surging seas.

In return, Meek gets to sell the mussels. Tested for purity every week by the state Department of Health Services, Meek’s harvest of Mediterranean mussels fetches top dollar at area restaurants and seafood markets.

His success at growing and harvesting shellfish miles from the coastline has inspired other types of open-ocean cultivation off Southern California. Meek, among others, is experimenting with underwater farms on leased acres in state-owned waters within three miles of shore.

This fall, he plans to be the first to move into commercial production on his leased acreage, suspending a network of long lines between anchors and buoys in water about 135 feet deep.

Seeding the lines with baby mussels and oysters, he hopes they will grow fat and juicy over the next 18 months on the rich soup of plankton that courses through the Santa Barbara Channel.

“The channel is one of the three best places in the world to grow shellfish,” said Meek, who has a Ph.D. in marine biology from UC Santa Barbara. (The other shellfish havens are off the coasts of Peru and West Africa.)

With moderate ocean temperatures and a seasonal upwelling of deep, nutrient-rich waters, the channel provides a fertile environment for mussels, oysters, scallops and other critters that feed on microscopic plankton.

“I see a day when a large segment of the coast, from Ventura to Goleta, will have fairly large acreage under cultivation,” Meek said. “The channel could produce 20 million pounds of shellfish a year, easily.”

Meek’s firm, Ecomar Marine Consulting of Goleta, collects about 200,000 pounds of mussels a year from half of the 26 platforms in the channel. The other platforms are either too small, too far out to sea or in water too rough for effective farming.

Ecomar will gross about $400,000 this year, with half of the income from mussel sales, Meek said. Yet farming the sea is more a labor of love than of profit, he said. His scientific consulting continues to subsidize the mussel harvest.

In earlier years, Meek has seen as much as 100,000 pounds of mussels develop on platform legs, crossbars and oil pipes that form artificial reefs. But the mussel populations are still recovering from the aftermath of El Nino’s global changes in ocean temperatures that dramatically altered spawning cycles in the mid-1980s.

To remove some of the gambles of nature, Meek has begun to cast mussel seed on the reefs of steel. He also grows thousands of oysters from seed, on trays and baskets that hang from crossbars.

The idea of harvesting mussels was spawned by a 1978 survey Meek did for Shell Oil Co. about marine life thriving on off-shore platforms. The study focused on how to slow the growth that, if left alone, would eventually create a seawall, filling six-foot gaps between platform girders.

Meek discovered several stages of growth on clean platform legs. Barnacles and algae are the first to attach and then, six months later, comes a carpet of baby mussels.

At about 18 months, the underwater structures are thick with full-size Mediterranean mussels, the species adored in Europe for its mild orange flesh. Biologists suspect the species migrated to these waters by hitching a ride on early explorer ships.

It took years for Meek to persuade oil companies that he could save them money by stripping them of their unwanted mussel crop. Finally, he succeeded after Phillips Petroleum had just spent $200,000 to clean two platforms. The usual method was hiring divers with high-pressure hoses to blast the critters to the bottom of the sea.

Most of the companies operating in the channel remain sold on the idea. They allow Meek to use their work boats to get to the platforms and give him small compensations for his work.

“It probably saves us $40,000 a year,” said Michael Light, who supervises Chevron’s six oil platforms in the channel. “There are indirect benefits too, like ending the perception that an oil platform is always a bad thing.”

Meek’s relationship with the oil industry has evolved in an unusual place. To many residents of the Gold Coast, offshore platforms are ugly reminders of the 1969 Santa Barbara drilling rig blowout that blackened miles of beaches and killed thousands of birds.

But the drilling rigs are gone, leaving the platforms to operate as mere oil-pumping stations with little or no pollution discharged into the ocean--except in the event of an accidental spill.

As a marine consultant, Meek concluded years ago that the platforms create a clean environment for mollusks.

Yet it took him years and reams of test results to persuade state health officials of the mussels’ safety. Meek continues to face skepticism from some potential customers who are unfamiliar with the daily operations of an oil platform.

“His mussels come up very clean,” said Ken Hansgen, supervising public health biologist for the state Department of Health Services in Sacramento. “Bob Meek is very trustworthy. The guy has a Ph.D. in marine biology. He knows more than some of us.”

Meek said the platforms, swept by fast-moving currents, are in a far cleaner environment than are the bays and estuaries along the coast. “We are so far from urban pollution, it makes all the difference in the world,” he said.

Unacceptable levels of sewage-related bacteria in a lagoon next to Carlsbad forced the state’s only other major mussel grower to shut down eight months ago. John Davis, president of Carlsbad Aquafarm Inc., said he has just installed a water-purification system so he can reopen for business. “It’s been a long road,” he said.

State health officials also ban the non-commercial harvest of mussels from May 1 to Oct. 30 because the entire coast cannot be tested for possible blooms of plankton that can cause paralytic shellfish poisoning. The naturally occurring toxins from the plankton do not hurt the shellfish that absorb and excrete them. But the toxins make people who eat the shellfish sick and can even cause paralysis and death.

But health officials said mussels harvested commercially are safe to eat year-round because they are tested weekly for the toxins. Meek’s mussels have tested positive for the toxin only once, in 1985, in his nine years of operation. All traces of the toxic plankton were gone in two weeks.

Meek’s wife, Jill, often hands out fact sheets to explain that the mussels she sells are routinely tested to ensure that they are safe. She hawks the mussels for $2.50 a pound retail at farmers markets in Santa Barbara on Saturdays and Santa Monica on Wednesday. She has also applied to work as a vendor in the open-air market in Thousand Oaks on Thursdays.

Some of Meek’s mussels are flown to a wholesaler in Chicago. But most of them, about 50%, end up at area restaurants in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. The restaurants swear by the local product compared to those imported from New England or New Zealand.

“We have people who come in strictly for our steamed mussels,” said Fred Miller, manager of Eric Ericsson’s Fish Co. in Ventura. “Eric is a stickler for freshness. The quality of the mussels is excellent.”

Like farmers on land, the 45-year-old Meek often rises before dawn to get an early start on his day. He usually returns to the office in the evening, his truck laden with 1,000 pounds of shiny black mussels.

On a recent day on Chevron’s platform Hazel three miles from Carpinteria, Meek and three assistants collected 30 bushels by cleaning a section of pipe that reaches 100 feet to the ocean floor. Mussels tend to attach themselves to underwater structures from the ocean’s surface to a depth of about 40 feet. Water deeper than that carries less of the plankton that mussels love to eat.

Before surfacing for an afternoon of sorting the day’s catch, Meek descended to a depth of 50 feet to retrieve a multitiered basket of oysters. A small school of bass trailed alongside, each fish hoping for another handout from their familiar friend.

Unlike mussels, oysters are not fussy eaters and will thrive in deeper water. Meek suspends about 50 such baskets off the platform’s legs. Each holds about 1,200 oysters.

“I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t fun,” said Meek, tugging off his wet-suit on a platform gangplank. “Some people think I’m crazy, but I love it.”