The combined forces of herpes and global warming are threatening to wipe out the world’s oysters — salon.com

Topics: , , , , , , Sustainability News, News An viral disease with a 100 percent mortality rate is decimating the world’s oyster populations, Bloomberg reports, threatening the $4.1 billion industry. Climate change, needless to say, isn’t helping the situation. Oyster herpes (no relation to human herpes), also known as Pacific Oyster Mortality Syndrome, has killed the shellfish across Europe, New Zealand and Australia — in one particularly brutal case, the University of Sydney’s Richard Whittington told Bloomberg, wiping out 10 million oysters in just three days. France has been hit especially hard, its harvest now 26 percent below where it was in 2008, when the virus first appeared.

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