Although North Carolina’s oyster industry has seen a recent resurgence, growers have suffered from unexplained losses of up to 90% in the past few seasons. NC State University researchers are investigating whether specific genetic traits might help certain oyster lines survive better than others.

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Love ‘em or hate ‘em, oysters have helped sustain our state’s economy throughout its history. 

In fact, oysters were once so vital to North Carolina that we went to battle over them. Roughly 25 years after the Civil War ended, North Carolina declared another war of its own, over the rights to its oyster beds. 

Harvesting’s History.

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Until dredgers came down from up north, oyster harvesting in North Carolina was mostly limited to small family farms, which tended oyster gardens near the shore. The depth of water they could work was limited by their rake-like harvesting tool’s handle length.

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Oysters quickly became a valuable commodity in the Reconstruction-era South. And after armed poachers were eventually ousted from Maryland and Virginia’s then-depleted Chesapeake Bay, these oyster pirates made their way down to the sounds of North Carolina. So in 1891, the state legislature authorized citizens to take up arms against out-of-state dredgers, which could harvest in deeper waters — and would often gather both young and mature oysters indiscriminately. 

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The industry peaked in 1902 and then, in part due to irresponsible harvesting practices, steadily declined until the 80s, when disease wiped out most of the remaining oyster population. While wild oysters may be way past their economic prime, oyster aquaculture has the state’s industry back on the rise.

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In May, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality granted NC State University $200,000 to further research into what can be learned from genetic lines of farmed oysters that survive mass mortality events caused by, for example, bacteria or parasites. Curious about why certain oysters survived, researchers plucked samples from aquatic farms, studied their genetic makeup and culled their genetic lines. They’ve already identified several lines in North Carolina that survived a mass mortality event. 

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This money is going toward the hatchery work to produce those genetic lines, and then  deploying those genetic lines to their field sites to study them.

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New Threats to a Burgeoning Industry

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Oyster aquaculture has grown into a nearly $30 million industry in North Carolina. And groups like the North Carolina Coastal Federation hope to see the industry grow to $100 million by 2030. For that to happen, though, oyster growers need help from researchers.

In recent years, farmers in North Carolina and other states in the Southeast have sporadically suffered from seemingly inexplicable mass mortality events — with some losing up to 90% of their oysters in a short timespan. 

 

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(Editor's note: This article was adapted from " How to Breed Hardier Oysters”

which originally appeared at https://news.ncsu.edu/2025/07/how-to-breed-hardier-oysters/