Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 29, 1990 TAG: 9003290749
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B3 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEWPORT NEWS LENGTH: Medium
Proponents of the idea say the Oriental oysters might be the salvation of the once-great Chesapeake Bay oyster industry decimated by deadly shellfish diseases.
Or the hardy exotic bivalve might be a weed that will run amok and wipe out what's left of the bay's native oysters, say opponents.
The debate over the oyster has raged for a year among marine scientists. This week, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science asked state officials to settle the matter.
The Marine Resources Commission said it will issue a decision on April 24.
"The worst-case scenario is that these animals will spawn, spread up and down the bay and displace the native oyster," said Roger Mann, professor at the Institute of Marine Science.
"Whether that will happen, quite simply, is we don't know," Mann told the commission. "But we are in the situation of potentially having to take a risk here."
The experiment could alter the bay's ecology and dramatically affect the lives of tens of thousands of people who harvest, process and sell shellfish.
But, Mann told the commission, things could hardly get worse for Virginia's watermen, who once made most of their income by harvesting oysters.
"We are up against the wall," he said.
The Chesapeake Bay oyster fishery, once the world's most productive, has been devastated the past 30 years by two mysterious diseases - MSX, or Multinucleate Sphere X, and Dermo. Harmless to people who eat them, each of the diseases is deadly to oysters.
Scientists have failed to understand what causes the diseases and have no clue about how to stop their spread or to help the native oysters resist them. Meanwhile, the diseases have infested as many as 99 percent of public oyster beds in Virginia, the hardest hit of East Coast oyster producers.
Desperate for a solution to the problem, the Institute of Marine Science imported Japanese oysters from the state of Washington last year. Mann and other researchers have been testing the exotic oyster in a quarantine laboratory as a possible replacement to the native.
The Japanese oyster already has shown that it can survive Dermo. But Mann said it must be placed in the bay to see if it can survive MSX; scientists cannot duplicate MSX in the laboratory.
If the commission approves the experiment, Mann will place trays of 800 Japanese oysters raised in the hatchery into the York River at Gloucester Point on May 1.
"It's time," Commissioner William Pruitt said, "to bite the bullet."
The proposal already has been endorsed by some oyster planters and watermen who see the Japanese oyster as the only hope for reviving their ways of life.
"If the oyster industry's going to survive in this state, we're going to have to do something different," Skipper Garrett, an oyster planter, told the commission. "And what have we got to lose?"
Mann said the Japanese mollusk enabled the French oyster industry said, to recover in a few years from shellfish diseases that had dropped oyster harvests from 80,000 to 2,000 metric tons a year. Currently, France produces more than 160,000 metric tons a year and employs more than 20,000 people in its oyster industry, he said.
But the Oriental bivalve in France also has been so prolific that it wiped out native oysters and became a fouling organism, Mann said.
Randall Martin, president of the Eastern Shore Working Waterman's Association, told the commission that what Mann was talking about doing was God's business.
At a recent discussion of the experiment at Rutgers University, Mann said, marine researchers split about the oyster's proposed introduction to the Chesapeake.
"Some accused us of playing God with ecology," Mann said. "Others said, `I can't understand what's taken you guys so long to do this.' "
by CNB