THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, November 19, 1994 TAG: 9411190451
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JAMES SCHULTZ, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 95 lines
In 1986, business was dying at Tommy Mason's oyster-shucking and processing plant in Chincoteague. So he and wife, Donna, tore down the building they and three dozen employees had worked in for 10 years and put up a motel.
Watching the ranks of harvestable oysters shrink to virtually nothing by the early '90s, the Masons knew they had made the right choice. But something surprising happened on the road to ecological catastrophe, something Tommy Mason now enthusiastically practices.
Call it a cottage industry or call it a revolution, ``oyster gardening'' is leading a way back for bivalves and may help the state's watermen recover at least part of a way of life that many assumed was gone forever.
Today, about 250 people are expected to gather at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester Point to hear about the success of oyster aquaculture in Virginia.
Mason and others will recount their own achievements with a new and decidedly nontraditionalapproach to farming the fruits of the waters.
``I've been raising oysters myself for 25 years,'' Mason said. ``This way that VIMS has is the best I've seen. And it's working.''
Working, says Mark Luckenbach, director of the VIMS oyster aquaculture program, to the tune of 1 million harvestable oysters over the past 2 1/2 years.
``It (oyster aquaculture) is fairly small right now, but it's a whole lot bigger than the wild fishery,'' Luckenbach said. ``We've gone from a VIMS experiment where we've been a seed supplier, to an emerging industry. The demand is there. And the demand exceeds the product (supply).''
The marine scientists' strategy is straightforward: to outrun and outgrow the two deadly diseases, MSX and dermo, that have wiped out oyster populations.
Since the early 1990s, VIMS researchers in their Gloucester hatchery have been quietly working to develop fast-growing oysters, descendants of native brood stock found orginally in Mobjack Bay between the York and Piankatank rivers.
Because MSX and dermo flourish in warm summer waters, scientists also experimented with delay of spawning. They chilled to springtime temperatures the water in which their seed oysters incubated. Seed weren't placed in the wild until late August or early September, when water temperatures were still warm enough for spawn but less hospitable to disease.
But perhaps the most radical innovation was an easy-to-build rectangular contraption made of plastic pipe, from which was suspended a wire cage with a lid. Once inside the cage, the critters were immersed in water but away from various dangers lurking at the bottoms of bays, creeks and streams.
``Off-the-bottom is the way to do it,'' said Paul Applin, owner of the Gum Point Oyster Co. in White Marsh and a scheduled speaker at the aquaculture conference. ``You get the oysters away from the silt and the predators. You get a better flow of water and more oxygen. All those things help the oyster grow faster.''
The results of oyster gardening, say those who have adopted the program, are nothing less than extraordinary when compared with current natural conditions.
Survival rates can approach 90 percent. Some of the oysters reach market size in 15 months, less than half the time required in the wild. And there's the sale price: 20 to 30 cents per oyster, at least double the going per-bushel wholesale rate.
The biggest and best customers are restaurants and raw bars, willing to pay premium dollar for a product customers scarf down by the dozen.
Luckenbach points out that oyster aquaculture is not a cure-all. Despite healthy spawn rates, cultured oysters won't by themselves restock a population that once numbered in the tens of millions. That will take decades, perhaps centuries.
Moreover, scientists are still struggling to understand the diseases that continue to kill the animals.
``I do not see aquaculture as rehabilitating the wild fishery,'' Luckenbach said. ``I do see it as the start of a new fishery. It is a way to furnish a high quality product and has real promise as part of a changing seafood industry.''
That start, say oyster gardeners, could provide a good living to people who love to work the water.
``You're getting people from a wide area (in Virginia) getting experience in growing oysters. I think it will all pay off,'' said Carter Newell, a conference speaker and president of a small oyster company in Maine. ``The watermen should be looking at this quite seriously. Small-scale aquaculture like this is perfectly suited to their way of life.''
Tommy Mason couldn't agree more. He often leaves his motel's ringing telephones behind to go down to the water, down to a creek just off Bogues Bay, about a 20-minute boat ride from his Chincoteague home.
There he checks on his growing babies. God willing, and if the creek doesn't rise too high, he'll be a happy man come next fall. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by TAMARA VONINSKI, Staff
Mark Luckenbach is working to revive the oyster population.
KEYWORDS: AQUACULTURE OYSTERS by CNB