"Armed with traditional knowledge and modern science, a small team hunts for the sweet spot that could save oysters from a parasite that has decimated populations in Cape Breton and beyond."
"The dead oyster falls from the plastic mesh bag with the hollow clop of a horse hoof on pavement. Its shell gapes, innards rotted. About 100 or more oysters—some living, some dead—quickly follow, clattering like maracas onto the flattened bow of Joe Googoo’s dark-green jon boat. Clad in a jacket with blaze-orange sleeves and a ball cap with a moose on it, Googoo pulls a knife from his belt holster in one smooth motion and taps oyster shells with its curved tip as he sorts through the mottled pile. Counting them one by one, he tosses lifeless shells aside and puts the living oysters back in the bag.
Beside Googoo, Robin Stuart, a large, curly-haired man in a tattered black-and-blue drysuit, perches on the boat’s edge. Stuart, one of Nova Scotia’s most experienced aquaculture experts, cracks jokes as he, too, picks around for “morts”—mortalities. “If you could grow an oyster big enough, Joe would be buried in it,” he says with a chuckle. As the longtime friends tally the dead, Stuart soon grows somber. “There’s almost as many morts as there are live,” he says in his gravelly Scottish-Welsh brogue. “MSX is definitely doing its thing here.”
Bras d’Or Lake, cupped within Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island, is actually a sprawling, semi-enclosed tidal network of bays, estuaries, and ponds scraped out by glaciers at the end of the last ice age. On its muddy bottom, Crassostrea virginica oysters once grew as big as brunch plates, with frilly shells and deep, round cups: qualities prized by oyster connoisseurs. For decades, the Bras d’Or oyster industry blended wild-caught harvest and aquaculture; locals picked oysters from public beds while commercial growers cultivated the shellfish in vast beds on the lake’s bottom and transferred them onto floating rafts to await packing and shipping."
Karen Pinchin reports for Hakai magazine with photos by Darren Calabrese June 15, 2021.
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