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This article was written by Elizabeth McMillan and originally published by CBC News on October 19, 2025. We are sharing the full text here for reference. All rights remain with the original publisher. 

Efforts to revive an industry in Cape Breton may provide hope for people across the Maritimes

Joe Googoo remembers hauling up cage after cage of oysters and discovering nearly all of his 400,000 oysters had either withered or the shells had opened and emptied.

The Mi’kmaw fisherman from Waycobah First Nation estimates he lost $75,000 worth of product when a shellfish disease first arrived in Cape Breton in 2002, a “pretty hard” loss. The parasite — known as multinucleate sphere unknown X or MSX — doesn’t hurt humans but it can kill oysters. It decimated the burgeoning aquaculture industry in the Bras d’Or Lake estuary, a unique ecosystem where saltwater from the Atlantic Ocean mixes with the fresh water flowing from the island’s river systems.

But Googoo, who first started selling boxes of the traditional food for $2 when he was 10, couldn’t envision making a living doing anything else.

“I didn’t want to quit, that’s the problem. I knew they could come back,” he said. “I’ve been depending on oysters the last 50 years. Now it’s the other way around. They depend on me.”

Googoo is one of the few people still cultivating oysters in the Bras d’Or Lake and the only person managing to grow hundreds of thousands of them. His work to cultivate them despite the presence of a disease that can cause massive mortality has become more pertinent following its detection in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island in 2024.

MSX’s arrival has left many people who spend years nurturing oysters to market size wondering if they’ll have any product left to sell.

Googoo and a small group of biologists in Cape Breton say amid the renewed urgency in finding oysters that are resistant to the parasite or survive despite its presence, they’re hopeful their work can inform industry and government, and help growers, fishers and processors navigate the unknowns posed by an organism that can only be seen under a microscope.

 

Though it’s been detected in waters across the province, so far MSX has impacted some parts of Prince Edward Island far more than others.

In May of this year, fishers who harvest oysters from public beds discovered that all but a few dozen oysters in Bedeque Bay — long relied upon as a lucrative place to tong oysters the traditional way — were dead.

Danny Adams, one of the roughly 200 people with a licence to fish oysters in the spring and fall, had to seek out smaller rivers in hopes of hauling in enough oysters to fill boxes he could sell. Some days his catch barely covered the cost of his fuel.

Adams worries about fishermen with young families, and said many of the people he’s fished alongside for decades have no formal education.

“Never thought it’d come to this. Long as you’re healthy, you could fish. You could go out and make a day’s pay,” he said on a brief break from combing the riverbed in Grand Lake, one of the spots where dozens of dories descended in the spring, prompting concerns about depleted stocks in future seasons.

“Hopefully it’ll come back someday. Hopefully I’m still around to fish. And hopefully the younger generation stays into it long enough.”

Martin Smith volunteers his time to advocate for the Island’s wild harvesters as vice-president of the P.E.I. Shellfish Association, including lobbying government to offer more financial support. He said the uncertainty is taking a toll on people’s mental health.

Calls to an industry line that offers counselling services have ballooned in recent years.

“We need to speak up to keep this industry alive,” he said.

“It’s not only the 200 people that rely on the fisheries. When you go to your processor, a lot of them have 12, 14, 15 people that work there too, and they rely on us to be able to go fishing so they can grade the oysters, pack the oysters and ship the oysters … Workers, they spend their money in the community, the trucking companies they collect money for, for trucking the oysters. There’s a lot of spinoff to it.”

About 20 kilometres farther west, the Hardy family has been in the seafood business since before Confederation. Three generations now work together at Leslie Hardy & Sons. They grow tens of millions of oysters on about 120 hectares of waterways leased for aquaculture, shipping to markets across Canada and the U.S.

 

It takes about three years for oysters to grow to the choice “cocktail size” that many restaurants prefer. Cultivating them is year-round work. Cages full of hundreds of oysters must be submerged so the nutrient-rich salt water can circulate. Rotating the cages through the year ensures the shellfish don’t clump and that nothing clings to them. They’re sorted for size and quality and returned to the water if they’re not yet big enough for market.

This spring, Gordon Hardy discovered that more than $1 million worth of oysters on his leases — product he thought would be ready to sell this year or next  — had perished. Oysters aren’t eligible for provincial crop insurance and so far, there are no government compensation programs.

When officials asked for proof of his losses, Hardy decided to pave his driveway with crushed shells.

Bradley Hardy, 21, who holds his own leases and has worked alongside his father full time for three years, said the losses have meant the family business had to take the unusual step and buy oysters from other growers.

In late July, he, his father and siblings were still sorting through one- and two-year-old oysters by hand, checking how many were hollow or had stunted growth, before putting the survivors back into cages in hopes they’ll keep maturing.

They noticed some had died recently, their shells still shiny inside with slivers of meat remaining.

“We’ve got a surplus of small ones but we just don’t know if they’re going to live through the winter,” said Hardy.

“It really is a waiting game. And you just don’t know whether to keep at what you’re doing, to expand more or play it safe.”

The oyster industry in the Maritimes directly employs thousands of people. There were 7,600 tonnes of oysters grown in 2023, valued at nearly $48 million, according to figures from the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans. That doesn’t include the spinoff benefits for people connected to shipping, tourism and retailers. The economic value has been estimated to be nearly $60 million in P.E.I. alone.

Biologist Rod Beresford, an associate professor at Cape Breton University and one of the only people in Canada devoted to studying the diseases that impact oysters, said for many years there was little interest in funding research related to MSX, but that changed after it was detected in P.E.I. The province is second only to British Columbia in oyster production.

In 2025, DFO announced about a million dollars for research projects related to MSX. Federal scientists are also studying how pathogens spread and the prevalence of the pathogen’s DNA in water, in hopes of learning more about predicting infection in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

The parasite can infect an area and lurk for years without killing any oysters. It strikes under a combination of conditions, attacking the animal’s digestive system as they grow.

Scientists have been grappling with what exactly those conditions are since the parasite hit the Eastern Seaboard of the United States in 1957. It first caused massive mortality in Delaware Bay and eventually was found from Florida to Maine, though oyster industries persist in many of the areas where it was discovered.

But two decades after its arrival in Canada, there’s still a “huge amount of mystery with MSX,” said Beresford.

First and foremost, it’s still not clear what host carries the organism between oysters.

“Where we don’t know how this parasite moves from one place to the next, I think it’s a huge threat,” he said. “This inability to predict, that is what makes it an exceptional challenge.”

Beresford is also part of a federally funded team studying oyster DNA, one of several projects that aim to find ways to develop oyster seed that will be resistant to MSX.

He cautions that any solution will take time, and sharing data between areas and institutions will be crucial to ensure people get information quickly.

“If we look to the U.S., because they’ve been on this journey in some places longer than others, there’s examples where it’s taken, you know, 10, 12 years before they get that oyster strain that’s showing resistance to mortality, resistance to infection, hitting the market,” he said.

 

In the meantime, Beresford said it’s important to explore short-term mitigation strategies.

In a nondescript industrial park on the outskirts of Sydney, N.S., he has set up what can serve as a mobile hatchery in a shipping container. The idea is farmers could monitor the condition of oysters and nurture their growth in a controlled environment.

A team from his lab is also working on a rapid test that could be easily transported to an oyster farm, so people can know immediately if their animals are diseased — information that could inform decisions about moving them and limit transmission.

In the past year, provincial and federal officials have stepped up surveillance and testing but official confirmation of cases still requires a positive to be detected in one of four Canadian Food Inspection Agency labs, which can take time.

Googoo’s work has also been key to gaining a better understanding of MSX in Cape Breton, Beresford said. Along with about a dozen growers, they studied conditions in the Bras d’Or, as part of a provincially funded project with Cape Breton University and the Verschuren Centre in Sydney.

For the past several years, Googoo has been experimenting with the best way to grow oysters in shallow waters not far from his home in Whycocomagh, N.S.

Oysters grown on the bottom of lakes and ponds didn’t last, but those suspended in bags in water that freezes have done well. He hopes his success will encourage other people to dip back into the business, and that it could help growers in other parts of the Maritimes as they plan where to put their cages and how to move their product.

Through his efforts, he has managed to grow cocktail-sized oysters — coveted for their uniform size that makes them appealing to customers — but there are no local processing plants to get them to market. Federal rules mean he can’t ship them to other parts of the Maritimes because of MSX. So for now, he tends to about 700,000 oysters at various stages of development — sharing the larger ones with his community and selling to local restaurants.

“This is important to me anyway, to help the oysters come back, because they’ve been here before us, right?” he said.

“It took me over 50 years to learn this, so why keep it to myself?”

Robin Stuart, a biologist and aquaculture consultant who has known Googoo since the ’70s, sees potential for hydrographic, temperature, growth and survival data from the Bras d’Or Lake to benefit people growing oysters in other areas.

“We can show other parts of the Maritimes that if you have the right conditions, you can still grow oysters in an MSX zone,” he said.

For Stuart, there’s also more at stake than an industry with economic benefits. He worries about increased development and that people are more focused on keeping the views of the striking vistas clear of cages than on the ecological implications. He said it’s important to understand that oysters offer the exceptional ability to filter excess nutrients out of the water.

“The Bras d’Or is a natural hatchery for a lot of marine species. The oyster larvae are food for juvenile fish, and when all those oysters are gone, the estuary is not the same,” he said. “It’s never going to be the same if we don’t put more effort into it.”

For its part, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans said in a statement that its priority after the discovery of MSX in Cape Breton was to stop it from spreading so it prohibited oysters from being transferred out of the Bras d’Or Lake.

“That mitigation measure was very effective for over 20 years,” the department said in a statement, adding that it’s been working with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and provincial authorities to “fill knowledge gaps on the disease, share findings, and leverage new technologies to better detect and monitor the spread.”

But Googoo and Stuart say the sting of government inaction in the years that followed MSX’s arrival in the Bras d’Or has never gone away.

 

“There was no effort to help an industry resuscitate and come back,” said Stuart, who called it a “lost opportunity” to spend years studying MSX’s impact in Cape Breton.

“Unlike the United States, where the universities and the government got behind trying to understand how you can still farm in the presence of MSX — you’ll never get rid of them once you got it. It’s there. But you have to learn how to live with it — that was never done,” Stuart said.

Stuart laments that he and Googoo and a handful of others in their 70s are among the only people with experience cultivating oysters in the area now, work he said requires intimate knowledge of the conditions in the environment, including salinity, depth and temperature.

“If the government stepped in a long time ago, [his oyster business and others] would be going full blast now,” said Googoo.

They hope their experience will serve as a cautionary tale and offer hope to people in regions now grappling with MSX.

On this June day, Googoo deftly slices open an oyster shell held in his palm, and points to a milky substance inside that confirms the mollusk has spawned following the summer’s first hot spell — offering the promise of future growth in this part of the lake.

 

He hopes his son and grandson will carry on his work and that people in other Mi’kmaw communities take interest in the industry.

“I don’t want to take this to my grave,” he said. “I’d like to see more people doing this.”

Source: CBC News. Original article available here.