(Triumphant music).

JACOB MCCLARREN: Hi Tom.

TOM HORTON: Good morning, Jacob.

(Sound of oysters falling to table).

TOM: Oysters are nothing gaudy.

Devoid of charisma.

A true and literal stick in the mud.

And yet this humble bivalve has inspired piracy... (Sounds of gun battle at sea).

Shooting wars.

Two centuries of environmental and social conflict... And libraries of legislation.

Humans have found oysters tasty forever, and quite profitable since at least the Roman Empire.

Oysters in Chesapeake Bay once employed more than a third of everyone fishing for a living in the United States.

They're not just good for food and commerce.

(Dramatic Music).

They cleanse polluted Bay water.

And their reefs form excellent habitat for a variety of marine critters.

Crassostrea virginica, the Eastern oyster: ranges from New Brunswick to Venezuela; but nowhere is it more at home or more controversial than Maryland's Chesapeake Bay.

(Dramatic music continues and crescendos over opening credits).

TOM: Worldwide, oysters are among our most depleted marine ecosystems.

They can't run and they can't hide, and they grow right along the same coastal edges of land and water where oyster-loving humans have built large civilizations.

Most of the world's oysters now come abundantly from farms, private aquaculture.

But Maryland, uniquely, is trying to save both its oysters and its free-ranging oystermen.

The lower Choptank River on Maryland's Eastern Shore mirrors the State's Bay-wide effort.

Here, watermen, oyster farmers, scientists, environmental groups, and consumers all share a passion for oysters.

To appreciate the challenge of what's going on here on the Choptank and around the Maryland Bay, meet Christine Keiner.

Her 2009 book, "The Oyster Question" examines what's essentially been a culture war over oysters going back 150 years.

CHRISTINE KEINER: The title of the book, “The Oyster Question,” refers to the, the debate, the controversy over whether oysters should be the product of nature or of culture, as in human cultivation.

At Johns Hopkins, I wound up learning about William Keith Brooks who was hired right when the university started in 1876.

He was just horrified that oysters were being removed at what we would now call an unsustainable rate.

(Mysterious music).

CHRISTINE: It makes sense to move towards a modern science-based system of cultivation, just like in modern agriculture.

For the watermen, this was a real threat.

It was a threat to their culture, their way of life.

TOM: Brooks had good reason to be concerned.

By late 19th century, an estimated 15 million bushels of oysters were being harvested annually from the Chesapeake Bay.

CHRISTINE: This peak in 1884 of 15 million bushels was really the result of a gold rush-like mentality and like incredibly intensive pressure on the Chesapeake Bay.

Oyster dredgers and tongers were scrambling and fighting each other to get to the best oyster reefs.

This was after the Civil War when demand for cheap protein across the whole U.S. was increasing... (Sound of steam locomotive).

and new technologies like refrigerated railroad cars made it possible to move raw oysters from the Chesapeake all the way out to the Rocky Mountains in just a few days.

Both the rich and the poor ate them.

There was this saying that you could tell a person's class based on what kind of alcohol they drank with their oysters.

That the poor had their oysters with lager beer, and the rich had theirs with champagne.

But 15 million bushels a year was definitely not sustainable.

This was a time when many other places with rich oyster resources uh, had made the shift towards private aquaculture.

But Maryland was very different due to the political power of the watermen.

TOM: Politics unique to Maryland explain a lot of the enduring hoo-hah over oysters.

Until 1966, it was one county, one vote in the state Senate, regardless of population.

That let tidewater oystering counties essentially jack around the more populous DC and Baltimore regions.

(Baroque sounding music).

It ensured dominance here of a public fishery and free-ranging watermen long past the time when the rest of the world, including Virginia, was moving toward private oyster farms.

Keiner argues with the simplistic take that Chesapeake oystering was just a so-called tragedy of the commons, a fishery open to all inevitably ruined by too many fishermen.

CHRISTINE: So of course, there are always, like, outlaws, people who try to take more than their fair share.

But most watermen wanted there to be more uniform and fairly enforced laws to ensure that no one person could get away with taking more than their fair share.

The regulated commons is a more accurate way of thinking about the Chesapeake resource.

There were many laws passed that I think actually helped to sustain oyster harvest at a level of around two to three million bushels per year from the 1930s up to the 1980s when the parasitic diseases Dermo and MSX hit.

MIKE WILBERG: So, in 1986 to 1987, we had a severe drought in Maryland and uh it led to a major disease epidemic in oysters.

It killed about 75% of the oysters we estimate in the state.

And after that, we had another one in 1999-2002 that did about the same thing.

And so oysters were in rough shape.

(Boat motor).

JEFF HARRISON: I remember we took a scientist out on my crab boat and made a few licks and he told us that they were all going to die.

Well, we laughed at him, you know.

There's no way this is going to happen and sure enough, over 99% of the oysters died.

Probably half of the watermen on the water that were full-time watermen actually found other jobs then.

If at that time they tried to close the oyster industry down, I believe they could have done it, because it wouldn't have been a whole lot of people saying anything against it, right?

But that's not what happened and, so, I stayed oystering.

TOM: Scientists are still trying to understand MSX and Dermo.

One early idea was to bring in a Chinese oyster that was thought to be resistant to both diseases and said to grow big as a pork chop!

MARK BRYER: Ostensibly it was going to help us with the couple diseases that had hurt our native oyster, but under further scrutiny... (Mysterious music).

MARK: We found that that oyster from the coastline of China was susceptible to other diseases that it could host and bring to the Bay and the conclusion at the end of the day was it wasn't worth the risk.

TOM: But the major scientific study triggered by the Chinese areiakensis oyster led to an ambitious strategy to manage all three parts of the oyster equation in the Maryland Chesapeake.

MARK: Maryland may be one of the few places on the planet if maybe the only place on the planet, where the state government has essentially designated different spaces for different things when it comes to oysters.

We have sanctuaries.

We have aquaculture areas, and we have wild fishery areas.

And the question is: can those three things coexist happily together, and can we invest in all three in a place so that they're actually mutually benefiting one another?

(Bright, upbeat music).

TOM: So watermen in Maryland remain part of the oyster equation.

And despite oysters at only a few percent of their historical abundance, there is reason for hope.

In 2022, watermen in Maryland harvested more than 500,000 bushels of oysters, their best catch in 35 years.

2023 is looking even better.

Like their fathers and grandfathers before them, watermen on the Chesapeake get up before dawn to brave bitter weather and often treacherous water in search of oysters.

With tongs and dredges, they forage the Bay bottom to find their Chesapeake gold.

MARK CONNOLY: I had an uncle who was a waterman and my brother, he had just gotten out of the Navy, and he started working the water.

And so I bought this little boat and I just started doing it... it was a lot easier because all you had to do was worry about going to work.

It wasn't complicated and now it is.

It's really complicated.

The other day my wife gave me the printout of what the Chesapeake Bay Foundation would like to see happen.

One of the things was a hail-in, hail-out.

And I'm like, "What sense does that make?"

A hail in and hail out would be like you got to call a dispatcher or something and say, "Hey, I'm Mark Connolly, I'm leaving the dock now at 5:30 in the morning."

And then when you come back in, "Oh, I'm Mark Connolly, I'm back in at 12:00."

Well, watermen don't work that way, they just don't.

TOM: Today's commons is more regulated to be sure.

You can't manage watermen's oyster harvest without knowing how many oysters are out there.

We count blue crabs and rockfish with scientific surveys every year, but oysters?

After a count in the 1880s when supplies still seemed inexhaustible, Maryland waited some 130 years to count again as politics trumped science time and again.

To no surprise, a recent count in 2018 showed some areas likely overfished; but it also found watermen's harvests apparently sustainable in other places.

MIKE: So, one of the major things I've been involved in is oyster stock assessment for Maryland which started in 2017.

And we've been able to um, do that to try to estimate abundance and mortality rates for the population.

So this was the first one that had been done, perhaps ever, but at least since the late 1800s.

And so that was the goal of our... of that study... was to try and understand is current oyster fishing sustainable and what would sustainable levels look like so we can try and nudge the fishery in that direction.

TOM: Maybe the biggest challenge with being equitable to both oysters and oystermen is the nature of the oyster itself.

Undisturbed, it forms reefs.

And in those reefs, lie the oyster's immense habitat values, nooks and crannies for all manner of other marine life, magnets for feeding larger fish.

And there is no way to harvest oysters without degrading or destroying those reefs.

For these reasons, creation of the world's largest sanctuaries, oyster reefs where watermen are forbidden, has become part of Maryland's strategy.

(Military-sounding music).

Maryland is not only protecting many reefs, it is rebuilding them with shell and feeding them new high-quality oyster larvae: spat attached to shell grown in hatcheries.

STEPHANIE ALEXANDER: I believe using hatcheries, as the centerpiece for restoration activity is a very good strategy.

And I'm always the optimist, so I always believe that we are making progress.

The Horn Point Oyster Hatchery has been working on our big contractor: Chesapeake Bay restoration and that was to restore five tributaries by 2025.

So to date, we have completed 4 out of those 5.

Horn Point Oyster Hatchery typically starts up in January by bringing adult oysters into our system.

Uh, these oysters are what we coin our brood stock, and they will be our future "moms and dads" for the babies that we produce.

Once we can start spawning them, we will coax them to start releasing their gametes into the water column.

At this point, we can sex the oysters and tell if it's a male or a female because they do emit their gametes differently.

Uh, males release sperm from the side and females open up and they clap.

We'll separate them at the end of our spawn, we will count all of the eggs, we'll fertilize them, and then we'll bring them into these big tanks and we'll dump them in, water of course, and we will grow them for the next two to three weeks.

And at approximately day 14, the larvae are going to start maturing.

LAB TECHNICIAN: I calculated the milliliters to larvae in this cone.

And because there's about 160 milliliters, I can multiply that by .1022, and that will tell me there is 16 million larvae in this cone.

STEPHANIE: And that's when we see a change in their behavior from swimming to actually crawling.

They develop an eyespot, which kind of looks like a dark spot in the middle of their shell, and they also develop a foot.

Uh, they're called pediveligers because they are footed larvae.

So, once they develop a foot, that tells me they are ready to attach to a hard substrate.

So these guys will go down to our setting pier and be introduced into a tank where I want them to attach to a shell.

SHANE SIMMS: So in each of these there are about 4.5 million in each of these two little bundles.

So we have about 9 million going into this tank.

STEPHANIE: So the Horn Point Oyster Hatchery can do orders of magnitude better than Mother Nature for setting.

So I don't know what our natural set rates are for the Chesapeake Bay, but in the hatchery, we're about 30%.

So if I put a million larvae into a tank with shell, I know I'm going to get approximately 30% of them to actually, strike to the shell that we can move out to the Bay.

WARD SLACUM: In partnership with the University of Maryland Horn Point Hatchery, we create baby oysters, attach them to shell, that's spat on shell, and uh, we use that to deploy those oysters in the bay.

What that does is it tends to avoid a lot of the mortality that you see uh, in the early life stages of oysters.

You get them right down on those reefs that need those new oysters.

STEPHANIE: I would say depending on the year, probably 70% of what we do goes to restoration and about 30% goes into the commercial fishery.

(Sounds of dredging and oyster fishing from boat).

WARD: We have been able to scale up to where, at this point, uh we are actually putting oysters down, uh, close to about 100 acres of oysters on an annual basis.

When we create the spat-on shell, there's a lot of oysters on one individual shell.

Uh, 100 acres of oysters uh could be close to a billion spat going out into the Bay annually.

MATT PLUTA: The target threshold is to have 50 oysters per square meter and we're learning that almost all of the three and six-year-old reefs that have been planted in these sanctuaries are meeting that 50 oysters per square meter.

When we look at Harris Creek, the Tred Avon River, and the Little Choptank, over 836 acres have been restored in those tributaries, and that comes with a figure of about 5.26 billion oysters that have been planted on those.

Now, not all those oysters are going to survive, but the idea is to front-load a lot of oysters on those reefs to give those reefs the best chance to reproduce.

The biggest threat to the Chesapeake Bay is excess of nutrients, namely nitrogen, phosphorous that's carried into our waterways, um, through stormwater runoff coming over farm fields, our towns, and um, our communities, our residential lawns.

And oysters can help clean up our rivers by filtering out the nitrogen and the phosphorous in the rivers that's being washed through.

MATTHEW GRAY: We already have some idea of some of the benefits.

We can go down and measure, like, their biofiltration rate, the denitrification, the amount of nitrogen they're removing from the bay.

We can do that, and we have done that.

We're gonna swing around here and we'll go out and grab some like background, away from impact area, samples.

CREW: Ok. MATTHEW: And you know, they're, in some ways, performing as we expected.

They're contributing services already and those are really valuable.

TOM: Sanctuary sounds great to the environmentalist's ear, probably to the scientist's, too; but to watermen, it sounds a lot like 'Keep Out'.

MARK: If you want to talk about sanctuaries, I mean that's uh, yeah... that's a hot topic... because when the State took 25% of the bottom, they didn't just take 25% of random bottom, they took 25% of the best bottom.

When you start working the water, it's a commons.

You know, that's how it was set up.

It was set up to be a commons.

It wasn't set up to be privately owned.

JEFF HARRISON: Harris Creek was kinda like holy ground for the people on Tilghman Island; it's where we had grown up.

As far as we were concerned, it was our bottom, even though it wasn't, it belongs to the State, we realized that.

But we knew what was best for it.

The restoration works started in 2011, I tried to work with the state at that time, no one wanted to hear what we had to say.

They really wanted the whole Choptank River.

Uh, we were lucky that we got Broad Creek.

MARK: I don't think a lot of people realize how much it affected the livelihoods of the people in a little community.

And I understand it's a democracy.

You know what I mean, the majority rules, but you've got to understand it's just a small little smidgen of people, that... of how greatly that affected them.

MATTHEW: I know this is a really controversial subject because a lot of watermen feel like they've been boxed out and not allowed to fish these uh traditional fishing grounds.

From a historical perspective, certainly, the damage has been done and oysters are not nearly as abundant as they used to be, but that isn't solely due to fishing.

It's due to all sorts of things.

But what we do know is that they are less abundant than they used to be and certainly uh overfishing hasn't helped.

TOM: Our failure to do enough science has also kept oysters controversial; PhD's and watermen arguing back and forth, neither really knowing.

That's changing.

With new advanced sonar, scientists like Matt Ogburn are getting clear video of what oyster reefs and their inhabitants look like in the murky Chesapeake.

MATT OGBURN: Our instrument would be at the top, sort of pointing out across the oyster reef.

And anything that sound from the sonar bounces off of is bright in this screen.

So the, they're sort of bright stable things that are parts of the oyster reef and then you can see these fish moving across at the top here.

Across the harvest reefs, we see sites that have a 100% cover of oysters.

So there's oysters everywhere, but it's flat.

It's like shells, shells, and oysters scattered over the whole bottom.

But where you really see differences are in the restored reefs, which tend to have clumps of oysters sticking up vertically out of the bottom and a lot more vertical structure, generating lots of prey for big fish and those bigger fish are coming in there and foraging on them, which is exciting to see.

TOM: Scientists are also studying the Bay's bottom to determine the effects of dredging.

Watermen believe that power dredging, their main way of harvest, actually improves the bottom by lifting shell and oysters out of the sediment.

MATT OGBURN: We know dredging has big impacts on the bottom.

If you have a restored reef that has a lot of vertical structure it'll knock that down.

You know, that's also not a surprise to anybody.

But if it's a place where there's sedimentation that's... a relatively thin layer that's covered over oyster shell that's there, it probably is a way to bring that shell to the surface where spat might land on it that otherwise would just find soft sediments that aren't suitable habitat.

MATTHEW GRAY: I think dredging is not nearly as bad as a lot of people think it is.

You know, you plant oysters on sandy bottoms on purpose so that they don't sink into the mud, so then when you come along and dredge, that sand is going to fall out pretty quick.

So the... the negative effects are pretty ephemeral, short-lived and you know, probably not that bad.

And so we want to go out there and measure that.

TOM: As part of his research, Gray is studying the effects of dredges stirring up sediment on oysters and their ecosystem services.

MATTHEW: I'll just keep making an impact at the same spot and then everyone else will be making measurements around that.

RESEARCHER: Ok. (Rumble of boat motor and splash of water).

TOM: One area of near total agreement on the oyster among all parties is oyster shell, we need lots more of it, or something very much like it.

More than anything else this lack of substrate limits oyster restoration.

(Mysterious music).

So what happened to all the shell from those huge historic harvests?

MARK BRYER: We mined that resource out of the Bay and didn't put it back.

We took so much resource out and used it for construction material.

It lined streets and driveways and sidewalks and the like.

Number two: as the population dwindled, it just wasn't replacing itself, we weren't building enough new shell.

And then thirdly, with...with pollution and sedimentation, we're burying shell at the same time.

TOM: During the MSX and Dermo pandemic, Lonnie Gowe, a fifth-generation waterman would spend all day tonging just to get two bushels of live oysters.

But Gowe says something good came out of the disease.

The shells of all those dead oysters stayed on the bottom, giving the next generation of oysters the substrate they need to build reefs.

WARD SLACUM: In Maryland, at least in Maryland, we are a victim of our own success.

We have actually promoted the growth of aquaculture, of the public fishing, um, and also restoration, and they all depend upon shell.

And so at this point, there really isn't enough shell to go around to maintain the growth of those three sectors.

Uh, there has been discussion about other materials that might be used to support those sectors.

JEFF HARRISON: When they first started going around, we told them, said, "Well, if you're going to do anything, please use shell.

Don't use anything other than shell."

Well, they ended up using mostly granite.

We're allowed to crab there, but you basically can't crab up there anymore, because your line hangs up in the stones and stuff.

So it was really devastating for our area.

TOM: Another limitation on restoration efforts is the cost.

We're spending millions in Maryland, on restoration of sanctuaries.

The price tag for building and operating a hatchery is hefty, too.

MARK BRYER: We don't blink when it costs a million dollars for a mile of roadway, but we blink when it's a million dollars or $10 million to build 500 acres of oyster reef.

Investment takes decades in many cases, and that requires political will, investment, and really consistent effort.

JEFF: One of things, the benefits of, was supposed to be from, sanctuaries was we would see this unbelievable amount of spat coming out of Harris Creek that you know, we would want more sanctuaries.

You know, it would be so great.

Well, we didn't see that.

TOM: Scientists at the Oxford Lab are developing a way to track the movement of larvae from sanctuaries or from those put into the Bay from hatcheries.

Where are they actually ending up?

JASON SPIRES: Many people are familiar with catching tagged fish or banded ducks, and resource managers learn all sorts of information about migration and growth from those mark and recapture tools.

Well, there wasn't really one for the oyster industry to use.

So we started developing a chemical tagging method here at the Oxford Lab.

So this is looking in between the two valves.

As if the oyster was oriented looking up at you.

And you can see that outer margin of shell that was formed that still has the calcine signature.

(Triumphant music).

So far we've been trying to deploy larvae uh with divers and them using a towed manifold behind a vessel.

Today we're going to be using um five-gallon, screw-top plastic containers that we can release larvae at a very specific location to hopefully create a unmistakable signature of a spat set that we can come back and monitor this winter when visibility is much better.

This is an oyster that was part of the original calcine labeling experiments in 2015 that we pulled from the water today that is still able to be positively reidentified with a calcine mark.

TOM: Spires and his colleagues are also developing new tools... JASON: Are you ready?

TOM: That could let oyster restoration at least partly bypass the cumbersome techniques of putting shells in tanks for larvae to attach to then distributing the shell throughout the Bay.

JASON: This is coconut fiber that has been woven and this is basalt fiber.

So, we can take this mesh and wrap it around pilings.

We can stake it onto rocks, riprap.

We could stake it onto sea walls.

And hopefully, the oysters that are growing on these materials will then colonize.

The aim is to provide the resource managers, the oyster farmers, and the wild harvest fishermen an alternative way to put oysters on the bottom that doesn't rely on the reclamation of tons and tons of oyster shell.

(Upbeat music).

We have a 38-acre oyster sanctuary, which was carved out in the 1960s to work on oyster disease research and oyster aquaculture that wouldn't be interfered with by the fishery.

(Splash of water).

Sometimes when you're diving on a reef in the Bay and you're coming down through the turbid water, and finally, you get to where you can see the shell out in front of you, where you're seeing the filtration benefits from not only the oysters but all the other organisms that are filtering on the reef itself.

And it also gets you thinking about the organism in a different way as part of the community that it lives in and supports, and not just this, uh, static organism that's in a, on a table in a laboratory or in a bushel basket.

TOM: Those private oyster farms William K. Brooks thought were the answer to "The Oyster Question" in the 1880s are finally popping up all over Maryland.

The emphasis on aquaculture got its political boost around 2010 with Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley.

He was inspired by its success in Virginia.

JEFF: Basically, that is why the Talbot Waterman's Association was established.

We were afraid that we were going to lose our heritage, the traditional way that we did our job.

Hand tonging, pat tonging, diving, and dredging.

(Sound of oysters dumping from net).

So um, we started fighting it in the legislature basically, because rules came in that were basically going to try to phase our industry out.

We're not against aquaculture.

We do believe it can work.

Any young waterman, I, uh wholeheartedly tell them, try to get into it.

But like I said, a part of the problem is right now the process takes four years.

(Bright, folk music).

TOM: When Kevin McClarren the Choptank's pioneer oyster farmer began, he had to grow his oysters in floats because the bottom was still legally off-limits to private farming.

KEVIN MCCLARREN: Nobody ever thought about growing oysters in the water column.

So, instead of us having to change the legislation, all's we had to do was just change the method.

MIKE WILBERG: Aquaculture has some of the same ecosystem values that the wild reefs have.

But typically aquaculture isn't building up habitat like a reef in sanctuary would be because those oysters are being harvested at a regular interval.

KEVIN: We have our own hatchery um that we can produce all our own seed.

That's not always economically the best way to do it.

So... past couple of years we've been buying eyed larvae from the university.

STEPHANIE: Here you go.

KEVIN: All right.

Four million?

STEPHANIE: Four million.

KEVIN: All right, sweet.

STEPHANIE: Sounds good.

Bye, Kevin.

KEVIN: See ya.

So we bring eyed larvae back and we set them in tanks in our hatchery.

You don't even think about them as animals, they're just material.

It's gravel, right?

It's gravel that grows.

We'll bring in 10 million eyed larvae from Horn Point and within three days I can have them all set and we can move those animals out to the river where they can feed themselves.

Three-quarters of the battle in the hatchery is growing the food to feed the animals.

Um, I don't want to have to do that.

(Bright, upbeat music continues).

KEVIN: We've been at it for almost 24 years.

We had a business plan that said we're going to grow a million oysters a year, grow and sell a million oysters a year.

That's how we make it financially feasible.

And uh we're still growing and hopefully selling a million oysters a year.

But you know, it gets harder and harder as more farms get into it.

I've used the analogy of pizza all the time.

Right?

So, when we first were growing oysters, we were the only ones, we had the whole pizza to ourselves and then more people came in and we had to split the pizza in half, and then we had to split the pizza in eighths.

We're at like 1/64th of a slice of pizza right now.

So, it's getting harder and harder to make a living because there's so many people in it.

At one point we had seven employees, you know, now we're down to two.

I see a big shakeout and fewer people.

Um, there's a lot of starry-eyed dreamers that get into it because they think it's going to be great and they're sold a bill of goods and they're told how great it's going to be, and then when they get into it; it's cold and wet and hot and sweaty and buggy and it's just, you know, you got to be cut from a certain cloth to be able to out here all the time.

TOM: As oysters have experienced a modest but significant comeback in recent years, we've seen an increase in entrepreneurship.

Nick Hargrove owns a seafood processing plant in Wittman, off Harris Creek, and another operation on Tilghman Island.

NICK HARGROVE: I think there's a wave of people starting to get into it now, mainly because of the abundance of oysters that are back in the Bay.

I think our first year we had three or four shuckers and we were maybe producing 20 to 30 gallons a day.

Now uh we have around 10 to 12 shuckers every day and we produce a little over 100 gallons a day of oysters.

A lot of them pick crabs for me in the summer and then shuck oysters for me in the winter.

Actually, the easiest part of the job is probably shucking oysters and probably the hardest part is selling them.

A lot of people say, "Well, we need more shucking houses in the state of Maryland."

That's fine.

You can shuck all you want, but you're not going to shuck a month if you don't have anywhere to go with your product.

I could scale this up tomorrow if I could sell twice as many.

Yeah.

What really kind of hurt this facility a lot is when the Harris Creek got designated as an oyster sanctuary.

It means that there's no wild harvest allowed in this whole body of water that this packing house sits on.

If this Harris Creek was opened up right now, I'd probably have between 20 and 30 boats that were tying in my spot here and offloading me oysters.

I've had to purchase properties in other locations in order to be able to have areas to buy.

KEVIN: Wild oysters and aquaculture oysters operate in a different realm.

Right?

So, most of your wild oysters are harvested.

They're thrown into the bushels.

They're taken to a shucking house where they're shucked, and they're sold.

Our customer base is looking for a clean, nice oyster that's ready to shuck and be put on a half-shell.

That's not necessarily where wild oysters operate.

NICK: Uh oysters are a luxury item.

They are a happy hour thing, they're a bar food, and they're an appetizer.

You don't have the restaurants, you don't have much, not many people take oysters home and cook them at home.

People don't like to shuck their own oysters.

TOM: Watermen and oyster farmers are both active participants in oyster restoration.

Most of the live oysters that come up in watermen's dredges and tongs go back in the Bay because they're under the 3-inch legal minimum.

LONNIE GOWE: Thank God, we got 'em.

Thank God, we got babies.

We got plenty of little ones.

Like I said, there's no doubt in my mind there's 50-75 baby oysters right there going back overboard.

You know, I'm only taking a couple of them.

(Clanging of bell).

NICK: Some people think about harvesting and they think that you're taking everything, like cutting crops down.

It's not like corns or beans.

When we harvest out of an area, we leave a majority of the oysters there.

TOM: Hargrove also participates in Maryland's Spat on Shell Program, which plants oyster shell on public bottoms with baby oysters, or spat, attached to them.

The program is partly funded by a restoration fund generated by watermen through oyster surcharges, a tax on bushels sold, and fundraising events.

NICK: I like the way that we're doing our restoration work because it's kind of one hand washing the other, you know?

The more we catch, the more we process, the more we plant.

It becomes a full perpetual cycle.

We, just for the public fishery, planted over 200 million oysters last year and over a hundred some thousand bushel of shells.

MARK BRYER: Uh, during COVID uh when restaurants were shuttering and many oyster farmers didn't have a place to sell their oysters... What's up, buddy?

Nature Conservancy was fortunate to receive some funding to support that industry uh by buying oysters from farmers who didn't have a place to sell them and use those uh, for restoration purposes.

WORKER: Single 84.

Single 96.

Single gaper 77... (Conversation continues underneath).

KEVIN: And you know, my suggestion to the people who were running the program was, "Why don't we do this all the time?

EMPLOYEE: So many oysters are going in today?

MARK: About 80,000, about 80,000.... KEVIN: So if we have a problem now in the industry where there's too many oysters on the market if we were to buy those oysters and put them down where they're more likely to survive than really young oysters, then we could be building reefs.

TOM: So what about that idea?

KEVIN: They didn't make the cut.

So we'll put them back for another year.

Then we'll go back and get them next year.

(Sound of oysters being organized).

TOM: We pay lots of lip service to the oysters' ecosystem values.

Will we start putting our money where our mouth is?

SCOTT ROBINSON, JR: These oysters here are about a year-and-a-half old.

They've got about another two months of growth... MATTHEW GRAY: Could we get oyster growers to grow oysters and remove that nitrogen for us and could they get paid for that service?

It might inject a lot of interest and capital into the industry.

And at the same time, it might improve the Bay's health.

(Sound of oysters spinning in machine).

(Mysterious music).

TOM: Frankly, the jury's still out on whether Maryland's unique and ambitious, 'something for everyone' approach, watermen, farmers, the Bay's ecosystem health can work long-term.

Have we answered the question Brooks posed 130 years ago?

Should we abandon the public fishery in favor of aquaculture?

JEFF HARRISON: I think we have all the right situations, you know, for it to be a good one.

(Chatter under).

CHRISTINE KEINER: There's still very much a contingent of working watermen who want to have a voice in the way that we're managing the Chesapeake and uh scientists and environmentalists who um have built coalitions and have relationships with watermen.

I feel like there is a lot of hope for participatory environmental policymaking.

TOM: Right now, it looks hopeful, but remember we are dealing with a resource that even with an estimated several hundred million oysters of all sizes out there in the Bay now; still a tiny fraction of its historical abundance.

Restoration efforts increase oysters by maybe a couple hundred acres a year, versus hundreds of thousands of acres that have been lost.

A recurrence of oyster diseases could test progress severely, encouraging once again a 'catch it before it dies' mentality and Bay water quality still needs lots and lots more work.

Just adding more oysters can never do it all.

STEPHANIE: We've degraded Mother Nature and we've put a hurt on the Chesapeake Bay for decades.

We're going to need decades of investing in oysters to bring them back to the Bay.

MIKE WILBERG: Some people are making oysters to be a silver bullet for all the nutrient issues in Chesapeake Bay.

I don't think we can um solve the bay's eutrophication problems solely on the backs of oysters.

MATT PLUTA: Humans are the problem and we have to be part of the solution.

We have to reduce runoff from agricultural fields first and foremost.

We have to reduce runoff coming from our towns, if we're gonna be serious about cleaning up these rivers.

MARK CONNOLLY: If you get the water quality right, Mother Nature will do it.

It doesn't need to be regulated by a sanctuary or something like that.

I mean, everybody can get behind that.

MARK BRYER: I look back almost 20 years now and I'm pretty astounded at where we are.

Here we are in 2023 with the largest restoration projects on the planet.

A wild harvest, you know, that's been the largest in I think 35 years, and the aquaculture industry increasing tenfold.

To me, a remarkable shift that happened in a pretty short amount of time.

TOM: Disease, pollution, and overfishing have done their worst, and the oyster still hangs in there.

Good for the economy.

Good for the Bay.

And good eatin'.

Well worth saving, wouldn't you agree?

Hmmmm.

Breakfast!

(Mysterious music continues through credits).