A review of published work on Crassostrea ariakensis

Field research on the Asian (Suminoe) oyster, C. ariakensis, began in 1998 at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) in response to a resolution from the Virginia Legislature to initiate investigations on alternative species. All field trials have used sterile triploids. Initial research indicated promising performances in C. ariakensis in a variety of salinities for growth and disease resistance. Research on this species continues at VIMS today, but in the meantime, the Virginia Seafood Council has run two commercial trials of C. ariakensis on their own with similar promising results. They have proposed a third for 2003 with about a million triploid C. ariakensis. The direction taken by industry clearly indicates a desire to proceed with larger and larger scale-ups of aquaculture using triploids. This notion was addressed in a symposium staged in 2001 where the general consensus found that "it is difficult to consider the risks of aquaculture of triploid (infertile) C. ariakensis as separate from the risks of diploid (fertile) C. ariakensis. That is, there was consensus that triploid aquaculture would inevitably lead to some introduction of reproductive individuals in the Bay, with unknown outcomes for population growth." Part of the difficulty in assessing the risk of such a scenario comes from the inherent difficulty of predicting the consequences of an introduction generally. Another difficulty of assessing risk, especially for C. ariakensis, is the lack of information on this species. The aim of this review was to provide an unabridged overview of the published works on this species. We may have missed some references that were obscure or indirectly referred to C. ariakensis. Many of the works on C. ariakensis were in other languages, principally Chinese. For Chinese articles, they were translated and are presented in somewhat more detail than those in English. Some were obtained while traveling to specific laboratories in China and would otherwise be difficult to obtain. We were as complete as possible give the timely need for this review.