Oregon Public Broadcasting

If you like oysters on the half shell or perhaps fried with cocktail sauce, listen up. Soon your favorite bivalve is going to cost more. And as our correspondent Anna King reports, it’s all because of a pesky bacteria.

The bivalve-butchering-bacteria is natural at low levels in the Northwest. But now it’s going gangbusters in the Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean.

Chris Langdon: "It’s Vibrio tubiashii."

That’s Chris Langdon, a fisheries professor at Oregon State University.

He says the bacteria prey on the small larvae that become oysters. At stake is an $100 million oyster industry that stretches from Alaska to California. Since about 2006 oyster farmers have been struggling to produce enough seed.

Chris Langdon: "The growers can basically manage through a year or perhaps two years of low seed supply. But when you are looking at a third year of low seed supply then the effects are going to be much more serious, because the grower can not maintain the harvests that are needed to meet consumer demand."

Langdon says shellfish farmers throughout the Northwest are already cutting back on their harvests. He expects prices to go up accordingly.

Warmer ocean temperatures and oxygen depleted waters might be some reasons the bacteria are flourishing.

Scientists are studying ways to filter out the harmful bacteria for aquaculture tanks. They’re also working to develop varieties of oysters that are bacteria-resistant.