Pamela D’Angelo reports.
It began with old preserved samples of a parasite called perkinsus. First recorded here in 1949, it causes a disease known as Dermo, which slows the ability of oysters to reproduce and can be fatal. But during the mid-1980s Dermo exploded, killing about 70% of wild oysters for decades.
Virginia Institute of Marine Science scientists Ryan Carnegie and Lúcia Safi harvest oysters for research.
Credit Paul Richardson of VIMS
“This archive of many, many years of glass microscope slides of oysters that were infected with perkinsus that we could evaluate to try to reconstruct this story of what happened with the parasite and its changes,” says Ryan Carnegie is a research professor at the Institute of Marine Science.