00:00The coastal hamlet of Stansbury on South Australia's York Peninsula is a haven for
00:09fishing, crabbing and growing oysters. It's where Steve and Jerry Boley have built a business
00:16and a life. Beautiful one day and beautiful the next.
00:23But that life took a dramatic turn when a harmful algal bloom, Karenia mikimotoi, appeared
00:29along parts of South Australia's coast, killing thousands of marine creatures.
00:35When toxins showed up in oyster samples, some farms on the York Peninsula and Kangaroo
00:40Island were closed as a precaution. We haven't sold an oyster for many, many weeks
00:46now, so we've had absolutely no income. My real concern is what's the recovery going
00:55to look like in the next 12 months? Are we ever going to be able to sell our oysters again?
01:01The answer may come from across the ditch, where the same toxins brought an industry in
01:06New Zealand to its knees.
01:08We had one in the early 1990s that really devastated our aquaculture industry. The whole industry
01:14was closed for almost a year while we had developed these testing methods and identification methods
01:20so that we could really protect human health from these toxins.
01:24The Cawthrawn Institute is using that expertise to test water and oyster meat samples for the
01:30South Australian Shellfish Quality Assurance Program. Researchers are now focusing on what
01:35other species might exist in the bloom. They're also analysing brevatoxin levels in oyster samples,
01:43which need to be at safe levels before closures on the affected harvest areas, are lifted.
01:50And that means an anxious wait for the likes of Steve and Gerry Bowley.
01:56The biodiversity of the marine ecosystem is being severely compromised by this thing.
02:02And something's going on out there, guys, and we need to know what it is.
02:08We need to know what it is.
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