Vineyard ponds may be in peril, but somebody forgot to tell that to the Tisbury Great Pond which is loaded with wild oysters this year, the biggest natural spawning of oysters in recent memory.

“It is huge,” said Rick Karney, who has been director of the Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group for over 30 years. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Mr. Karney said.

As subdivisions go, the plan for Flat Point Farm in West Tisbury could hardly be more carefully balanced between the need to plan for family succession and the desire to maintain the farming tradition, so threatened on Martha’s Vineyard.

Yet it has served to raise a whole raft of questions that go to the very heart of the Island farming methods, which contribute disproportionately to the Vineyard’s most pressing environmental problem, pollution of the great ponds by excessive nitrogen.

A serious oyster disease that has afflicted Edgartown Great Pond for years is now in Tisbury Great Pond and it is expected to cause a major die-off in the months ahead.

The disease known as Dermo is not harmful to humans in any way but it is responsible for having caused the collapse of the oyster fisheries from Cape Cod to the Gulf of Mexico. The only cure, according to Rick Karney of the Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group would be a frigid winter. The parasite that causes the disease can’t stand bitter cold water.