The past decade has witnessed an extremely rapid development in the "science" of mariculture, especially the design and operation of modern oyster seed hatcheries. The Department of Marine Culture at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science over the past seven years has developed an oyster hatchery system through research and cooperative efforts with the fisheries industry. This system, including the biological protocol to be described in detail on the following pages, has been tested successfully and is a modification of that system used at Chesapeake Sea Farms, Inc. in Ridge, Maryland. It...