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Online Stock Market Trading North Carolina's native oysters, once so plentiful that boats foundered on their massive reefs, are clinging to life. As barometers of water pollution, their decline signals a coast in trouble.

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Stock Investing Course Commercial harvests are down to 3 percent of their peak a century ago. Development continues to close shellfish beds as streets and parking lots funnel bacteria into once-fertile estuaries. Disease, overfishing and lost habitat have all hit stocks hard.

Stock Market Game "We're probably at the lowest point in recent years, even the past couple of centuries," said Craig Hardy, who heads the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries' resource enhancement section.

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Stock Investing Game The struggle to save oysters means more than saving an industry that adds less than $1 million a year to the state's economy. As the bivalves go, so do the 2 million acres of N.C. sounds, bays and creeks they labor to cleanse.

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Stock Market News Robust oysters mean other fish probably are healthy too. Researchers say restoring oyster reefs, which are magnets for hundreds of species, would boost the growth of other seafood.

Stock Investing Basics For now, though, it's more likely that the half-shells at the local raw bar came from the Gulf of Mexico. At least one state official predicts N.C. commercial oystering will end within a decade.

Stock Investing Software Reversing the decline will depend largely on fixing development practices that unleash waves of polluted stormwater after each rain, experts say. The N.C. Coastal Federation and nearly 30 government agencies and universities will sponsor a March 16-17 conference on the troubled oyster.

Stock Market Trading The marine fisheries division tends oyster sanctuaries, replenishes beds and ferries young shellfish to cleaner waters. An imported Asian species being evaluated might someday boost dwindling native stocks.

Stock Investing For Dummy "The oyster population might not be recovered in our lifetime, but we have to lay the groundwork," Hardy said. "It's not going to be a quick fix."

Stock Market Crash Long-term damage

Stock Investing Tip The past and future of N.C. oystering converge at a small farm on Stump Sound, a pocket of clean water north of Wilmington.Bernice Rice, 78, grew up there, shivering through cold winter days in her father's skiff as he poled out to the oyster beds.

Stock Market Chart "It was hard work, and we got $1 a bushel back then," said Rice. "We could get seven to eight bushels a day."

Online Stock Investing Now traditional oystering families face declining stocks, lower prices, smaller catch limits and a set of problems unimagined a century ago.

Stock Market Crash Of Dredging, which sparked a late-1800s war between N.C. fisherman and out-of-state competitors, damaged oyster beds.

Stock Investing For Beginner Disease took hold in the late 1980s. A parasite called Dermo devastated Pamlico Sound, North Carolina's prime oystering ground. It moved down the coast within a few years, taking the heaviest toll on oysters already stressed by water pollution.

Finance Journal Personal Development filled pollution-absorbing wetlands and new homes crowded the shoreline, creating more hard surfaces for stormwater to sweep clean of pollutants and fewer barriers of trees and grasses to intercept them.

Stock Market Report Sediment can bury oyster beds. Fecal bacteria from people and animals -- which closes beds to harvests -- indicates the presence of microbes that can cause gastric problems and diseases such as cholera and hepatitis.

Finance Investing Stock Market Nutrients from upstream farms and sewage-treatment plants cause algae blooms that suck oxygen out of the water.

Wall Street Journal Com Oysters in prime beds, where coastal streams empty into the sounds, once gorged on a steady flow of food. Now they bear the brunt of inland sewage, farm chemicals and animal wastes moving toward the sea.

Stock Market Investing Advice About 364,000 acres of N.C. waters are permanently closed to shellfishing, many of them near municipal sewage outfalls and marinas. But that doesn't include the 45,000 acres that may temporarily close, for as long as two weeks, after a 1 1/2-inch rain.

Street Trader Wall Those beds teeter on the brink of being forever lost to oystering.

Indian Stock Market South Carolina, which has a smaller coastline and no huge sounds like those to the north, prohibits or restricts shellfish harvests in 166,734 of its 571,000 acres of shellfish waters. About 82,000 bushels were harvested in 2002, compared with 401,000 bushels in 1985, the year before the state's last cannery closed.

Stock Investing Advice As water quality deteriorated in North Carolina's White Oak River from stormwater runoff, the state early this year closed an additional 279 acres to shellfishing.

Free Journal Street Wall "It definitely takes a toll on us. It's kind of like losing a job, you know?" said Cedar Point shellfish dealer Gene Taylor.

Stock Market Information Taylor, who buys oysters from the White Oak and other local waters, said so many beds closed because of rain last year that he couldn't keep up with Christmas holiday demand.

Penny Stock Investing Local oysters, like the people who harvest them, Taylor said, "are kind of turning into dinosaurs around here."

Stock Market Stock New ways replace old

Stock Market Investing Basics Bernice Rice still works Stump Sound, whacking clumps of oysters apart with a short "nubbing iron" as daughter Bonnie Swartzenberg tongs them up from the bottom.

Black Hoodies Street Wall Bonnie and husband Jim are riding a new wave, growing designer shellfish.

Stock Market Trading Tip Their J&B AquaFood imports oyster larvae from hatcheries, usually from Louisiana. The microscopic bivalves go into open tanks stocked with small shell chips to which the larvae attach. Two to three months later, the young oysters are separated into flat, mesh cages that are suspended in the sound. After another six months of growth, they go into bags or larger cages to reach market size.

Stock Option Investing "By the end of March, we hope we'll have all this planted," said Jim Swartzenberg, a retired Marine Corps major, surveying the white poles that mark leased shellfish beds.

Small Cap Stock Investing Luxuriating in the food, oxygen and sunlight just below the surface, the cultured oysters grow fast, reaching the 3-inch legal minimum in half the usual three years. They fetch a big price: 45 cents each, nearly three times the price of bottom-grown oysters.

Value Stock Investing "To go out there and try to make a living off a wild crop, you just can't do it," Swartzenberg said. "There's not much of it, and every year it becomes less and less. Mariculture has got to be the future of oysters."

Invest Stock Market A researcher at UNC's Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, meanwhile, is studying a fast-growing Asian oyster that Dermo can't kill. The species tastes much like the natives.

Stock Investing System Here, sterile Asian oysters, which theoretically couldn't reproduce if they escape into the wild, would be farmed as a supplement to native stocks. The Asian study has had mixed results -- the first two crops died, possibly from a parasite never before identified.

How To Invest In The Stock If successful, said Charles "Pete" Peterson, the Asian oysters could help rebuild the hard-hit coastal economy.

Beginner Investing Market Aquaculture also would allow oysters to be raised for their ecological services -- filtering water, drawing fish to restored reefs, even locking up some of the planet's excess carbon in their shells.

Black Real Street Wall Sanctuaries planned

Bond Investing Stock The latest attempt to revive oysters is the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries' plan to restore large reefs and create a network of sanctuaries. Five sanctuaries, where oyster brood stock is off-limits to harvesting, have been completed and three to four more are planned for this year.The division also has in place an oyster-shell recycling program. It operates a fleet of boats that dump tons of oyster shells and limestone marl, the clean, hard surfaces to which larval oysters attach.

Stock Market Prices But cleaning up the water is the key to survival.

Free Stock Investing Bacteria die quickly when exposed to sunlight, said Bill Kirby-Smith, an associate professor of marine ecology at the Duke University Marine Laboratory in Beaufort, N.C. But the coast's increasingly efficient ditches and drains, he said, rush stormwater, laden with bacteria from wildlife, pets and septic tanks into estuaries within hours, not days or weeks.

Analyst Street Wall Any method of slowing the water down, such as artificial wetlands or stormwater-retention ponds, he said, would help intercept the bacteria.

Stock Market Data Stormwater rules approved last year by the state Environmental Management Commission would do some of that. The new rules, intended to remove pollutants from stormwater, would offer special protection for shellfish waters, prohibiting new or expanded stormwater discharges and requiring measures to control fecal bacteria.

Gold Stock Investing The rules were due to go into effect in August. But a legislature-appointed review board rejected the proposal in January. The EMC voted to challenge the ruling in court.

Street Wall Words It's a controversy Bernice Rice's late husband, Bill, would have followed closely.

Stock Market Online Investing The Alabama native always marveled at the year-round wealth of food available in Stump Sound, where he farmed and oystered. "Bill used to say that people didn't appreciate what they had here," Bernice Rice said.

Direct Stock Investing He became an early advocate of protecting coastal waters, fighting a second "oyster war" over development plans for the sound's Permuda Island in the 1980s. The state later bought and preserved much of the island.

Stock Market Investing Guide Bill Rice died four years ago, at 87, in a last rescue attempt for oysters. A large yacht cruising the Intracoastal Waterway swamped the boat, throwing Rice and the Swartzenbergs into the water. The three had been transferring shellfish from polluted waters to Stump Sound.

Investing Growth Stock "He fought so hard for the sound," Bernice Rice said, "and then it took him."

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Christian Investing Stock The conference "An Encore for Oysters" will be March 16-17 at the Crystal Coast Civic Center in Morehead City. Registration is $40; call (252) 393-8185 or go to www.nccoast.org.

Stock Market Investing The Decline of Oysters

Choice From In Street Tough 1902 | Record N.C. harvest of 1.8 million bushels

Stock Market Index 1984-2002 | Saltwater acreage permanently closed to shellfishing increases 18 percent

Free Stock Market Quote 1988 | Harvest plunges as disease devastates N.C. oyster beds

Investing In Stock Option 2002 | 46,082 bushels harvested

Com Journal Street Wall 2004 | Restored beds, sanctuaries, aquaculture, improved water quality seen as keys to reviving oysters

How Made In The Stock Market Charlotte Observer - 3/7/2004

Topic: Ocean

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