America’s Seafood Leaders IT’S CHALLENGING TO REMEMBER
a time when Virginia — the nation’s third-largest seafood-producing state — wasn’t known for its flavorful, briny oysters and succulent clams, but the late 1990s and early 2000s were a dark era for shellfish producers. Oysters, in particular, thanks to warming temperatures in the Chesapeake Bay, were dying off from diseases and a lack of solutions to treat them. Many oystermen — including third- and fourth-generation family businesses — closed their doors. “It was a pretty desperate time. [We worried that] we were going to lose the Chesapeake Bay oyster industry because of disease,” said Bruce Vogt, president of Gloucester County-based Vogt Oyster Company (doing business as Big Island Aquaculture Oysters), which has been farming oysters for around 10 years. That started to change in the early 2000s, when Dr. Stan Allen took over as director of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science’s (VIMS) Aquaculture Genetics and Breeding Technology Center and began genetically breeding oysters that would survive. When Allen effectively produced diseaseresistant oysters around 2003, oyster hatcheries realized a resurgence. In 2005, when VIMS released its first survey of
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