SHELL GAME

A MYSTERIOUS PARASITE IS KILLING CAPE BRETON’S OYSTERS. NOW SCIENTISTS AND INDIGENOUS HARVESTERS MAY HAVE DISCOVERED A SOLUTION TO SAVE THEM.

- Karen Pinchin

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 more oysters—some living, some dead—quickly follow, falling on the flattened bow of Joe Googoo’s dark-green metal johnboat. Clad in a jacket with blaze-orange sleeves and a ball cap, Googoo pulls a knife from his belt holster and taps the oyster shells with its curved tip as he sorts through the mottled pile. Counting them one by one, he tosses the lifeless shells aside and puts the living oysters back in the bag.

Robin Stuart, a large, curly-haired man in a tattered black-and-blue dry suit, 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 caused by the oyster parasite MSX. But as the long-time friends tally the dead, Stuart soon grows sombre. “There’s almost as many morts as there are live,” he says. “MSX is definitely doing its thing here.”

Bras d’Or Lake, cupped within Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island, is a sprawling, ocean-linked tidal network of bays, estuaries and ponds. 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. Filter-feeding oysters grow in salty ocean waters and have hard, calcium-based shells that protect soft innards: heart, gills, stomach and other organs. For decades, Cape Bretoners 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.