SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX) — Scientists, researchers, and volunteers are working on an Olympian quest – to restore the Olympian oyster to once-historic levels at a coastal wetland along the Monterey Bay, an effort that may help to curb the impacts of the warming climate.

At the legendary Swan Oyster Depot in San Francisco, the line forms early. If you’re lucky to get a seat at the seafood counter, you’re in for a treat: the restaurant just got a fresh shipment of the only oyster native to the West Coast of North America.

The Olympia oyster, native to the Puget Sound area and named after Olympia, Washington, is as small as a silver dollar but big in flavor. They are described as slightly briny with a coppery finish.

“I grew up eating these oysters and I think they’re just fantastic,” exclaimed Swan co-owner Steve Sancimino

Olympias are not endangered, but their once-abundant numbers have dramatically declined, largely due to overharvesting and mining practices during California’s Gold Rush, as well as persistent problems of pollution and loss of habitat.

Scientists, researchers, and volunteers are working to restore the Olympias to their historic levels in the wild. At this point, the Olympia oysters are not able to reproduce at numbers that can be self-sustaining.

One Bay Area restoration site is located at one of California’s largest estuaries.

“We are here to bring back oysters to Elkhorn Slough where they have lived for millennia,” explained Dr. Kerstin Wasson, who heads up the pioneering restoration project at the slough and works for NOAA’s National Estuarine Research Reserve. “We’re doing it with optimism and hoping that if we can bring back a million oysters to Elkhorn Slough, they’ll be self-sustaining. And today is one step towards that goal.”

In the slough, because of agricultural runoff from the Salinas River, the restored oysters won’t be harvested. But their intended role is big and critical: to filter water, stabilize the shoreline, sequester carbon, and provide habitat for other creatures – all big benefits as the planet warms.

“It’s really important that we help to restore this population,” said Dr. Luke Gardner, who works for California Sea Grant as an aquaculture extension specialist. He also works for Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, which is administered by San Jose State University.

At the lab’s aquaculture hatchery, specialists “borrow” adult Olympias from the wild at Elkhorn Slough and bring them back to the hatchery to breed baby oysters that will be involved in the restoration effort.

“In a hatchery, we can control a lot of the environment and we can make sure those little babies make it through to being juveniles,” noted Gardner.

The baby oysters require tender loving care: micro-algae for food, the right temperatures, protection from predators, and plenty of fresh water.

“They’re very needy and very dirty so they are really fun to take care of, but they need a lot of attention,” said Moss Landing Marine Lab scientist Jacob Harris.

Harris told CBS News Bay Area that when the baby oysters are ready, they attach to hard surfaces, including large clam shells that are also collected from the slough. Gardner and Harris carefully gather the oyster-encrusted clam shells, put them in special mesh bags, and pack them in a cooler.

They also collected baby Olympias from their water-filled silos and put them in plastic tubs to be loaded into the van headed to Elkhorn Slough There, scientists and volunteers enthusiastically jumped into action to unpack the precious cargo.

California State University, Monterey Bay student Taylor Garcia is aware of the world’s warming change and says she wants to be part of the solution.

“There always has to be optimism when it comes to this line of work,” said Garcia. “I guess because without it, you really wouldn’t get anywhere.”

The work is unusual but makes a lot of sense. Each volunteer is tasked with counting each baby oyster stuck to a shell or floating in a small container of water. They then measure the largest one that they can spy on each shell. They then record their findings on an iPad and secure each clamshell to PVC pipes tagged with a unique identifying number.

Once all the oysters are counted, secured, and tagged – there were about 80,000 baby oysters on all the shells – the volunteers picked up the PVC pipes, and now clad in rubber boots, caravaned with their treasures down to the estuary. There, the volunteers formed a brigade, carefully passing the pipes down to the scientists, who planted them into the muddy goop and low tidal waters of Hester Marsh. The scientists will continue to monitor these sites and record what happens with each group of oysters.

“The oysters have been here for 7,000 years and on my watch, I don’t want to see them disappear from Elkhorn Slough,” said Wasson, as she lined up the pipes.

Back at Swan’s, patrons thought the effort was well worth it. If they can restore the oysters in the wild at Elkhorn Slough, perhaps they’ll see more of all kinds of oysters growing in the wild.

“I think it’s a great initiative. It benefits not only the environment but also folks who truly love oysters. So, I think it’s a win-win for everybody,” said customer Phirun Pheap.

It didn’t matter to Sancimino that these oysters were not intended to be harvested and eaten. He said that was not the point, and applauded the scientists and researchers involved.

“I’ll be honest with you, if what they’re trying to establish down in the slough works, that’ll be one step closer to reviving a native species and putting it where it belongs in this state,” declared Sancimino, as he offered fresh Olympias to his happy customers.

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June 2, 2021

wolterke – stock.adobe.com

Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf said Wednesday that the bank, including its wealth management business, is now on the offensive after “the aftermath” of bad press over the company’s banking scandals with fake consumer accounts subsided.

“We were extremely distracted as a company,” said Scharf at the Bernstein 37th Annual Strategic Decisions Conference. If you look at everyone who works “day in and day out with customers”, “they weren’t really offended in any way, shape or form”.

“It was a defense,” said Scharf, who took over as CEO in October 2019, adding that the company will “nudge” its path to focus on growth rather than addressing the problems of the past.

Scharf’s remarks come a week before the first face-to-face meeting of the Wells Fargo Operations Committee, which the bank chief put together last year primarily through the hiring of 10 of his 18 members from other companies. They’re also coming because Wells’ Wealth and Investment Management department has undergone a multi-year reorganization that has created uncertainty among some executives in the field.

But Scharf has been shining the spotlight on the San Francisco Bank’s wealth management business over the past few weeks, giving some pointers to the company’s strategy at a conference in May when he said he expected the business to be better off the high net worth Mass customers can capitalize on the consumer base.

“We have people in the consumer banks who are wealthy, not very wealthy, but wealthy and have considerable sums of money to invest, and we just haven’t used the wealth we have,” Scharf told an online audience on May 19 at the Wells Fargo Financial Services Investor Conference, as per the transcript from Sentieo, a finance and corporate research platform.

Wells Fargo’s competitors have embraced this type of proprietary brokerage opportunity and “done so well,” added Scharf.

Scharf did not identify competitors by name, but his bank’s own wirehouse competitors have been promoting closer ties between banks and brokers for years.

For years, executives at Bank of America and its subsidiary Merrill Lynch have emphasized the profitability of cross-selling banking and wealth management clients. Merrill President Andrew Sieg recently promoted the parent bank’s client acquisition pool, identifying more than 3 million Bank of America clients with net worth in excess of $ 1 million, more than three times his brokerage firm’s 850,000 existing clients.

Prior to the Wells fake account scandal in 2016, the company had also pushed for more cross-selling between its businesses, but it stopped reporting the number of banking products per wealth customer in its quarterly results to keep the wealth business out of the aftermath and Aggression to distance sales culture.

However, these ghosts still haunt the company. During Scharf’s conversation on May 19, an analyst noticed that Scharf had not used the word “cross-selling” specifically and asked, “I was just wondering if there is any sensitivity to it?”

“Yes and no,” replied Scharf, noting that the strategy with “the right controls” made sense.

“This is not about cross-selling. It’s not about setting the necessary goals or numbers, ”said Scharf. “We have a limited but important range of products, and the point is to adequately serve customers in each of these areas.”

Sure, some of the cleanup is still going on, even after Wells Fargo reached $ 3 million with state regulators last year to resolve some of the cross-sell claims.

Wells Fargo terminated several former bank-based advisors this year after conducting a review of decades of insurance sales and discovering that they had mistakenly received referral credits for policies that were canceled shortly after they were issued.

It is also still in the process of shutting down its international wealth business and expanding its sales force, which has declined by nearly 2,000 net from 15,086 to 13,277 (including several hundred private bankers and banking advisors who joined late last year).

As a sign of health, Scharf reported on Wednesday that Wells Fargo increased its forecast for revenue-related spending for 2021 from $ 500 million to $ 900 million, based largely on asset management costs – specifically brokerage commissions. The cost increases are “a good thing,” added Scharf quickly, “because our revenues are higher and we like the margins and returns in our asset management business.”

He also said Wells Fargo will “roll out a new mobile application” by early 2022.

A Wells Fargo spokesman had no answer at press time when asked if the new mobile application tools would be available to wealth management firms, but said the broker accounts had been built into previous versions of such tools.

-Mason Braswell contributed to this story.

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