He is barely away from the dock when he passes the cleared land for a new community of estate homes. A little farther along, a new marina has crowded out his crab pots. On the opposite bank, red surveyor's tape is waving in the trees.

Bruno can't help wondering how much longer there will be a place on this river for fishermen in rubber boots and dirty T-shirts, pulling a meager living from muddy water.

"Where it used to be fishermen," Bruno says, "now it's condos."

The development boom transforming North Carolina's inland coast is dismantling the state's seafood industry, which already was collapsing under falling prices, rising fuel costs and shrinking catches. More than 34,000 homes and thousands of private boat slips are planned along the sounds, rivers and estuaries in areas once prized more for their bounty of shrimp, crabs, oysters and flounder than their waterfront views.

Run-down fish houses, which buy seafood straight off the boats and sell it to wholesalers all over the country, are making way for condos that sell for a half-million dollars and up. The workman's docks where fishermen tie up are being replaced by private marinas where pleasure boaters sometimes pay $100,000 for a permanent slip.

In some areas, pollution from development is forcing the state to close creeks to shellfishing. Yields have suffered after years of overfishing. Fishermen are getting out.

In the past five years, the number of commercial fishing licenses in the state has dropped by a quarter, to about 3,900. Commercial fishermen caught just more than 79 million pounds of seafood last year, the lowest catch on record and less than half what fishermen caught a decade ago.

No one keeps track of the number of fish houses in the state, but an informal poll of current owners yielded a list of more than a dozen that have closed in recent years. Many owners who remain say they are simply waiting on a pricey enough offer.

Some are calling it a crisis that could mean the end of North Carolina's fishing business -- and an end to local seafood.

"The public is losing access to the fish," said Barbara Garrity-Blake, an anthropologist and member of the N.C. Marine Fisheries Commission. "There's no way they're going to get North Carolina shrimp or crabs or tuna if the commercial fishermen aren't out there."

In the fishing industry, some say the development boom is economic salvation for an industry that is doomed anyway.

Low-priced imports -- from Mexico, Venezuela, China, India and other countries where labor is cheap -- had grabbed 80 percent of the nation's seafood market by 2004, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports. The imports drive down the prices that many American fishermen get for their catch.

Shrimp, until recently a mainstay of the North Carolina seafood industry, now sell so cheaply that many have stopped catching them. Shrimp in restaurants and grocery stores, even at the coast, come largely from Ecuador, Pakistan, Peru and a host of other countries.

Crab processing facilities are closing in droves. There are 14 in the state, down from 24 five years ago and 45 two decades ago. Many closed out of financial necessity, not because developers came knocking.

"Every crab plant we've got in the state is barely holding its head above water," said Wayne Mobley, who oversees inspections of shellfish processors for the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources. "They're not making money."

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