While researchers in the Bay region have been at work for years trying to map the outbreaks of oyster disease, to understand its cause and to discover why the Eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) remains unable to defend itself, they lacked stable funding for such a sizeable undertaking. In 1989, however, the U.S. Congress enacted legislation to fund a focused initiative, the Oyster Disease Research Program.

While researchers in the Bay region have been at work for years trying to map the outbreaks of oyster disease, to understand its cause and to discover why the Eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) remains unable to defend itself, they lacked stable funding for such a sizeable undertaking. In 1989, however, the U.S. Congress enacted legislation to fund a focused initiative, the Oyster Disease Research Program.

This extensive program of ongoing research coupled with outreach and management efforts aims to better serve the restoration of healthy populations of oysters in the nation's coastal waters. The Program began in 1990 with oversight by the NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service and its Chesapeake Bay Office, and is now administered by the National Sea Grant College Program.

Through competitive proposals each year, the Oyster Disease Research Program is supporting efforts to develop:

• optimal strategies for managing around disease
  
• molecular tools to better monitor the onset and presence of disease
  
• better understanding of the processes of parasitic infection
  
• improved understanding of the oyster's immune system
  
• hatchery techniques for producing disease-resistant strains

As one researcher says, it is a program that spans approaches from the "molecule to the mudflat."

"In the first six years," says Bill Rickards, director of the Virginia Sea Grant Program, "we have made enormous progress in our understanding of the dynamics of disease and in capabilities that are now ready for field trials." These capabilities include molecular probes that can rapidly determine whether or not an oyster has Dermo or MSX - conventional tests require laborious laboratory confirmation that can take days, says Rickards. This ability to diagnose quickly whether oysters have Dermo or MSX could better enable aquaculturists to take remedial actions such as moving oysters to lower salinity waters where disease may be less of a threat.

Several years ago, Rickards points out, scientists at Rutgers University, the University of Maryland's Center of Marine Biotechnology (COMB), and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) determined how to culture Dermo, allowing them to grow significant quantities in the laboratory. This has had enormous benefits for scientists, says, COMB researcher Gerardo Vasta, who, with his colleagues, helped to lead the effort in Maryland.

Research that Rickards is especially excited about for its near-term potential are the studies for developing oysters that are more resistant to disease. Oysters that survive to maturity will not only lead to larger commercial harvests but will help begin restoration of depleted oyster reefs, thereby returning some of the oyster's important ecological function to the estuary. While he is sanguine about the prospects, Rickards is also realistic. "It has taken more than a century to decimate the nation's greatest oyster resource," he says. "We are not going to restore it very quickly, no matter how successful our research proves to be."

Without that research, restoration of the Bay's oyster populations would no doubt be even further off.

For more information on the Oyster Disease Research Program, visit http://www.nsgo.seagrant.org/research/oysterdisease/RFP.html

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