Mysterious illness killing oysters in prime growing region

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Farmers in a prime oyster growing region south of Hobart are making the heart-breaking decision to close their operations because a mysterious illness is killing oysters in the bay. After three years of stock losses, watching millions of dollars including their superannuation and homes vanish, some have reached breaking point.

Transcript

00:00This once bustling, oyster-growing waterway at Cremorne, south of Hobart, has turned silent.

00:09Oysters are dead or dying.

00:10Except there's something in the water that's stopping the fish from feeding and killing

00:14them.

00:15There's something massively wrong in the ecosystem somewhere along the line.

00:19Ron Schwenke put 800,000 baby oysters in the bay in spring, hoping for the best.

00:25At harvest, they would have been worth three-quarters of a million dollars, but now they're worth

00:30nothing.

00:31We're really the canaries of the bay at the moment.

00:37Whatever's happening in the bay, we'll see with our test oysters, so it's not looking

00:44good.

00:45During the 1990s, Pipe Clay Lagoon was one of the most productive oyster-growing waterways

00:50in the state.

00:52Hundreds and millions of oysters came out of here.

00:55Now these farms are struggling.

00:58It shows just how dramatically things can change in the world of farming.

01:03Farmers say the state government was slow to act.

01:06The mystery illness has been killing oysters for three years.

01:09In this situation, we're just not getting any information, any kind of help really to

01:15try to, or a very limited amount of help.

01:18Stuart Hanson can't hang on.

01:20He's packing up.

01:21It's been too long, it's been a few years, and you just can't keep putting money into

01:27a bottomless pit.

01:28A new investigation funded by the Tasmanian government started in December.

01:34We've got an aquatic microbiologist, we've got a physiologist, an aquatic veterinarian,

01:40and we've got a marine ecologist.

01:41So we've got a good suite of experts and technical staff to support this study.

01:48A wide net for a complex problem that's already driven farmers out of business.

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