By Cory Nealon, firstname.lastname@example.org | 247-4760
12:37 AM EDT, April 3, 2011
Growing oysters in Virginia used to be a lousy business venture.
Only the most ardent farmers could steer the Chesapeake Bay delicacy past diseases, predators and other obstacles into adulthood.
That was before advances, most notably the creation of a genetically modified oyster, made cultivation easier… and profitable.
Now everyone from watermen to real estate agents want part of the action. And the industry, after years of flying under the radar, is stirring controversy in Hampton Roads and beyond.
Waterfront property owners worry their serene views will be fouled by the sights and smells of the seafood trade. Oyster growers are concerned the tension will prompt lawmakers to zone the bay, effectively limiting where they can work. That, they say, could hamper a business that many believe is the commercial fishery's only chance for survival.
"The industry is growing very rapidly," said Thomas J. Murray, a seafood economist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester Point. "There's a lot of delicate discussions taking place."
Growing oysters, known as aquaculture, has been practiced in Virginia for more than a century.
The most common method was to transport wild harvested seed — the James River being the primary source — to privately leased grounds. The grower would dump the seed overboard and let Mother Nature do the rest. Oysters would be ready for harvest in three years.
To the casual observer, it appeared no different from the hunter-gatherer approach employed by watermen for centuries. The method worked until a pair of deadly diseases — MSX and Dermo — spread throughout the bay in latter half of the 20th century, killing oysters before they matured.
It is seldom practiced today, Murray said.
Scientists struggled for decades to combat the diseases, which, combined with overfishing and loss of habitat, depleted the bay's oyster population to 2 percent of its historic levels. The breakthrough came, oddly, as they developed an Asian oyster that some thought was the best way to revive the fishery.
VIMS professor Standish Allen began creating a sterile — it does not reproduce — Asian oyster in 2003. It grew bigger and more quickly than native Chesapeake oysters. More importantly, it was less susceptible to MSX and Dermo.
The dalliance with the Asian oyster ended, however, in April 2009 when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers scrapped the project. A foreign species may carry viruses harmful to humans and, possibly, outcompete native oysters, Corps officials said.
The decision, while frustrating to Allen, the Virginia Seafood Council and other supporters, proved fateful.
Instead of dumping oysters into the bay and waiting to see if they survived, growers isolated the Asian oysters in bags, floats, and cages to carefully monitor their growth.
While labor intensive — the cages must be pulled from the water and cleaned of debris every few months — the approach yielded results.
Growers, such as John Vigliotta of Mobjack Bay Seafood in Gloucester County, began doing the same with sterile, native oysters. Because sterile oysters put their energy into growing, many reach market size in 12 to 18 months — before diseases can kill them.
"They grow twice as fast, so it's a definite plus," said Vigliotta, who has been growing oysters since 1998.
State officials and industry followed with another technique: spat-on-shell, the process of setting oyster seeds to shells in tanks before depositing them in the wild.
Both methods worked and the success emboldened Virginia's largest oyster processors, who import Gulf of Mexico oysters to make up for the lackluster local catch, to invest in aquaculture.
From 2005 to 2009 annual seed plantings more than quadrupled. The number of farmed oysters sold reached 12.6 million in 2009, a number expected to grow when 2010 numbers are released later this year.
"I still feel like the sky is the limit," said Doug McMinn, co-owner of Chesapeake Bay Oyster Co., which includes one of the state's largest oyster farms on the Rappahannock River.
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