The first person to plant Japanese oysters in East Coast waters was probably a scientist. Sometime in the early 1930s, a researcher drove down to the New Jersey shore, carrying a bushel of Japanese oysters and planted them in Barnegat Bay, a narrow estuary behind the state's barrier islands. The scientist was none other than Thurlow C. Nelson, already chairman of the Zoology Department at Rutgers and director of New Jersey's two shellfish laboratories.

His Japanese oysters grew quickly at first, raising his hopes that gigas oysters might revive Barnegat Bay's struggling oyster industry. After two weeks, the oysters stopped growing and gradually died out, perhaps from low salinity and low oxygen. But Nelson's interest was piqued. If he wasn't the first person to ever plant Crassostrea gigas in East Coast waters, he was certainly the first to talk about it.

In the spring of 1946, shortly after the end of World War II, Nelson strode to the podium at the New Yorker Hotel and told the annual convention of the National Shellfisheries Association that it was time to try planting oysters from Japan in East Coast waters like Chesapeake and Delaware bays.

It was a powerful message to an important audience. Nelson was a well-established scientist, and his audience that day included members of the Oyster Growers and Dealers Association of North America. In the decade before World War II, growers along the West Coast had done very well importing, planting, and harvesting a Japanese oyster called Crassostrea gigas — so well that East Coast growers began worrying about losing the post-war market to the faster-growing Japanese oyster. World War II was now over, seed oysters from Japan were becoming available again, and a post-war economic boom seemed to be gearing up.

It was a propitious moment for optimism and Nelson was nothing if not optimistic about the potential of the Japanese oyster. He extolled its fast growth in high-salinity waters and passed along reports of four-foot oysters once found in Japan. "If it were possible to obtain in our Eastern oyster the rapid growth of the Japanese oyster," he argued, "it would revolutionize our industry." He called for Japanese oysters to be "promptly shipped" to shellfish laboratories on the East Coast. To an audience of oyster growers he also suggested that "test plantings be made on a small commercial scale under natural conditions."

Gene Burreson found a copy of Nelson's 1946 speech when he was sleuthing through the historical literature, looking for evidence of early introductions of Japanese oysters. From historical records like this he arrived at an uncomfortable scenario: scientists like Nelson and growers like those in his audience may have brought in MSX.

If one exotic oyster species brought disease, can we depend on another species of non-native oyster to restore the Chesapeake?

At first only a few people followed Nelson's advice about testing Japanese oysters, at least according to the published reports that Burreson found. In 1949 a shellfish manager on Cape Cod planted six bushels of spat into Barnstable Harbor. That same year wildlife officials in Maine tried a small planting of Japanese and European oysters in a pond, and Victor Loosanoff, director of a federal marine laboratory, planted European oysters in the waters of Maine and Connecticut. According to a 1950 report, there were also "numerous attempts" at introducing Japanese oysters in Long Island Sound.

In Nelson's speech, in hindsight, are some of history's terrible ironies — and perhaps some scientific hubris. The siren call of fatter, faster-growing oysters apparently led some scientists and growers to try planting local waters with non-native oysters — and all their hidden hitchhikers. In popularizing the potential of Japanese oysters, Nelson may have unwittingly helped call down the destruction of the native oyster species he spent his life studying.

For Burreson, the reports and the anecdotes are evidence of a trend, a readiness on the part of scientists and growers along the East Coast to experiment in a casual fashion with Japanese oysters. "It was brought in a lot by scientists," says Burreson. "They would bring them in and just put them off the dock or put them in trays to see how they would grow. It was done by industry members [oyster growers] as well, probably a lot, but not nearly so well documented."

It's not surprising that Burreson's claims have stirred some dissent, especially from scientists who worked at Nelson's old lab at Bivalve, New Jersey. "Some people would like to say Doc Nelson brought gigas into Delaware Bay." says Walt Canzonier, the former grad student who worked with Nelson nearly 50 years ago. "I don't see anything in the record to indicate that. He may have had gigas here to work with, but not in very large numbers, that's for sure."

Despite his claims for Japanese oysters, Nelson had little reason and probably no funding for launching a major research effort or planting program in Delaware Bay, says Susan Ford, another scientist with the Rutgers Bivalve Lab. "In the early 50s, oysters were not in short supply," argues Ford, "so there would not have been any emphasis to do anything serious." Growers elsewhere along the coast may have been planting gigas, as the historical records suggest, but there is no evidence, says Ford, that anybody tested gigas in Delaware or Chesapeake bay — at least in the years before MSX appeared.

After MSX struck, everything changed. New test plantings, most of them small scale, were reported in Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Virginia. And always there were anecdotes of unreported plantings. One of Burreson's favorites is the story of the man who brought Japanese oysters home from the Seattle World's Fair of 1962 and planted them off his dock. An ambitious seafood entrepreneur admitted planting gigas in Maryland waters in the 1970s, and a Virginia grower announced at a science conference that he made large plantings during the 1980s.

By the 1990s, the Virginia Seafood Council, in hopes of saving a declining seafood industry, was asking scientists to find an alternative oyster to replace the rapidly disappearing native oyster. The first strong candidate that scientists put forward for planting in the Chesapeake was, ironically enough, the Japanese oyster, Crassostrea gigas. And one of the scientists who went to work researching the potential for gigas in Chesapeake waters was, ironically enough, Gene Burreson.

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