>> my husband omar and i have lived at least part time on a trtributary of the bay y for abt 30 years, so i love cruising on the bay, i sail on the bay. and i love discovering all the tthings that the bayay has to offer. it's mymy backyard, it's my plplayground, it's personal to me.. despite all sorts of efforts, aand legislalations, andnd good intentions, t the bay is still dying. in fact, on our dock, i was just

noting yesterday when i went out and looked--w-we have a dead zonone right atat our dock, ththere's nothing grgrowing the. when most people think about the oyster, they y know the s storif the oystermen. they know the story of the watermen and all of their problems over the years, bbut they don't knknow so much about the ecolological valulue of the oyster. it's a great filter of the bay,, it's respoponsible in some ways for the health of the bay, and one of the most interesting thingngs, to me,e, was thatat an oyster can filter 50 gallons of water a day. and what it actually means is that the oysters eat algae, and wn you t too muchlgae iit smothers the oysters, it keeps out the sunlight, you can't do photosynthesis, and if we can support the ecological value of the oyster as much as the consumer value, we're doing a great service to the bay.

[crickets chirping] >> it's the first day of oyster season in maryland. and the tongers are out in full force in broad creek, a tributary of the eastern shore's largest river, the mighty choptank. >> hand tonging is a traditional method of harvest. it takes somebody who is tough and has a great love of the water to do it. they enjoy being who they are, what they are, where they are, and doing what they're doing.

it's a a pretty good way to s sd your life. >> you get up early, you get to see things that people that work in offices don't ever see. iit feels self rewawarded, you know, it's good. it's good. >> you're your own boss and you can go when you want. [chuckles] quit when you want, start when you want. if i had to start all over again i'd probably be the exact same thing. >> well, kurt's r right that hes his own boss, within t the limitations imposed by the state of maryland. he can fish for oysters from october 1st through marchch 31st from sunrise until 3:00 0 p.m., except in january,, when he can tong oysters until sunset, which is not much later than 3:00. he's limimited to 15 busushels r day,y, per persoson, or 30 busls per boat. and the o oysters he e catches e to be e at least 3 i inches.

while the hand tongers work the shallower waters at broad creek, divers and patent tongers with hydraulic controls and larger rakes search for oysters in deeper waters. in november, the power dredgers join the tongers for the rest of the season and are bound by even stricter regulations. dredgers include the few remaining skipjacks that once filled the bay. under sail, skipjacks can haul in 150 bushels per boat, but if they use motorized push boats, which most working skipjacks do, they can only dredge your oysters two days a week. >> and the draw of being a waterman was that big day, and that's been taken away through regulations and it's very difficult. it's a lot more regulations, a lot less profit in the business so, a lot less opportunity to have big days,

they're very regulated, no matter if you're able to catch $1,000 worth in oysters, where you coululd do that in the past, you're scheduled you're going to make $300 at the best, no matter how hard you work, you stop at $300. >> there's been a long history of tension between watermen and state government over fishery management and regulation. why? because watermen want fish, and the state wants to save the chesapeake oyster from extinction. iit's a complilicated sisituati. >> they've put new restrictions on everything just about every time you go out, every year, you know, and... they probably don't want us out there, to be honest with you. >> there's watermen tong broad creek, millions of oysters remain off limits in the next tributary, harris creek. >> one of the key strategies for expandnding the bay's oyster population was to esestablish ad

prototect a network of continuos oysterer sanctuaries throughghot chesapeake bay. in 2010, departments set aside 24% of the bay's good oyster grounds to be permanently protected from harvesting. >> well, the sanctuaries i'm not in favor of them because they took 25% of our bottom away from us, but it t was 75% of the most productive bottom tthat we had. so, i mean, it really put an impact onto the commercial fishery. i believe that we could achieve a better effect while having a managed reserve. and they could be openened up wn you have new market, like jujust beforere thanksgigiving for r yr thanksgiviving ordersrs, anforr christmas for your christmas orders. and that would really help the industry. >> because they do get opened for harvest periodically, you're not going to have the devevelopment of the e 3 dimensl reefs that youou would get ovevr time in a permanent sanctuary where that vertical growth of oysters is allowed to build upon

itself over time and provide that 3 dimensional habitat. but everything's a compromise, i think y you need to mix in a cocoideration n for the e fishes and a consideration for the ecosystem. >> i understand watermen's frustration of seeing areas that they can't w work to have oyste, but the ultimate goal is long term survival of the resource and the lifestyle that it has supported. >> there have been oyster regulations in maryland for over 100 years and there's always been resistance from the watermen, but with the publicic resource it has to be managed for everybody, not just for a seselect few people. >> oysters are important from a commercial point of view. they've sustained a fishery, they've sustained livelilihood for peoplplfor hundrereds of years now.w. they're also extremely important ecologically.

>> sadldly, the number of the bay's native oysters is estimated to be about 1% of historic peaks. from an ecological perspective, that titanic loss of oysters is a disaster for the health of the bay. >> we're tryrying to achieve an increase in the oyster population n which will result in an increase in the ecosystem services provided byby oysters. we used to be able to filter the volume of the bay in a few days, now it's on a scale of a year. >> the primary pollution problem iin chesapeake bay is nitrogen and phosphorous that come from a variety of sources a and what ty do is stimulate a severe overabundance of microscopic plants called phytoplankton or algae. >> if there's too much algae in the water, that shades out sea grasses and bottom dwelling plants and they start to decay, and when they decay it uses up oxygen and then other things

start to die. >> that results in a largee volumume of the bay in the deder wawater thahat has no oxygen or sufficient oxygen to support higher life, we calit thehe dead zone, and this c be upo 40% of the volume of t b bay in the summe s so thiss s a vere assau to thsystem.. > thehe oters are removing thaat algae, carining up thehe water thatetets sunligight penetrate deeper to sea grasses and other bottom dwelling plants so that they can photosynthesize, the more oysters you remove from the system, the less filtration popower you have.. >> so, when we're restoring oysters to the bay, oyster reefs, oyster bars, oysters in numbers approaching what they might have once been, you are replacing that filter. >> restoration is almost the wrong word to use, i'd say, because it assumes we're going back to some time in the past.

there's no getting back to the way things were. we don't have the water quality we had, but we have, you know, millions of people living in the chesapeake bay watershed, and so it's not feasible to go back. the way to look at it is, where do we want to go from here under the conditions that we have now. we want to restore oysters in our sanctuaries to particular densities. we're looking at a density of 50 oysters per meter squared, and that's pretty high. >> maryland's plan for restoring oysters in permanent sanctuaries dovetailed with an executive order by president obama to protect and restore the chesapeake bay. the implementation strategy calls for a collaborative restoration of 20 targeted tributaries by 2025. >> it's a phenomenal collaboration that we hadn't seen before that's most noteworthy because it't's trying to establish whole systems, not just individual reefs.

and you've got the national oceanic and atmospheric administration, noaa, involved in a lot of that planting and monitoring. >> the red line is a sanctuary boundary. >> you've got the corps of engineers involved and planting substrate. you've got the university of maryland involved with their oyster hatchery and producing seed oysters. a non-profit, called the oyster recovery partnership, planting those seed oysters on that ground. and you've got the state of maryland's department of natural resources pretty much serving as the quarterback for all of that. >> the first targrgeted tributay was harris creek in talbot county on maryland's eastern shore. the plplan calls for restoririn7 acres of oyster reefs in harris creekek at a cost o 1 million n dollars. >> we chose harris creek because it had the greatest likelihood of success. the water quality is good, we have good salinity

here for oysters. there's not much runoff compared to other areas of the bay. it's a different approach than we've been taking in the past having these small scattered projects, have one very large project, and so we took all the production from the hatchery this year that was going to go to ecological restoration, and we put it all in harris creek to try and jump-start the population here. >> this past year, the partnership was able to produce 1.2 billion oyster spat, which i'i'm not aware of any oyster hatcheryry for this spsps of oyster thahat's ever b been e to do that in a single season, so we're pretty proud of that. maryland dnr brings the shell here, it's aged for a year so that the organic matter can rot off of it. it's then washed and contntainerized d by the oyststr recovery y partnership. it's put in our setting tanks, and we add hatchery produced larvae to them, and we let the spat set on those shells.

>> these are some hatchery plantings that were put out two years ago, and you can see how much they've grown in two years. >> you can see on this cluster, the muscles we have growing here, the barnacles. it provides habitat for a number of different species that are growing on the shells. these oysters were dredged from harris creek as part of the 2013 fall survey of oysters. >> 62. >> 61. this year we've visited over 260 bars and took well over 300 samples. what we found in the fall susurvey is ememendously encouraging.g. at least in certain areas of the bay, oysters seem to be thriving. >> from the survey, mitch tarnowski and his team create a biomass index based on oyster abundance and weight. >> the biomass index has increased to a point where it's

the highest in the 23 years that we've been measuring this. >> that's great news for the watermen as well as the bay. watermen were expected to see their best season in 3 decades. based on the first two months of the 2013-2014 season, harvests were estimated to be as high as 500 thousand bushels, although the cold and icy wiwinr may put a chill on expectations. 500,000 bushels is a lot of oysters, but still a drop in the bay compared to harvests before 1980. so what happened to the oysters? when you look at the chart of diminishing harvests, it's easy to assign blame to watermen for over fishing, and no doubt there was a gold rush on oysters for centuries. but it took more than over fishing to cause the flat line that defines a dying resource in the first decade of this century.

>> we weren't over fished because what happened was when theisease camame in and killed the oysters that we hahad, it wiped it out. >> two protozoan parasites are major pathogens of oysters in chesapeake bay waters. one pathogen causes a disease known as dermo disease, and the other pathogen causes a disease known as msx disease. >> the first time that oyster disease really became a big deal in the region was in 1959 when we had this explosion of msx activity. >> that was the first time disease decimated oyster harvests in modern times. but it wasn't the last, and it wasn't the worst. >> oyster mortalities from both mmsx and d dermo disease occur in chesapeake bay during drought years when water salinities are elevated. >> you have a drought, i pretty much bet my life on it, me a and a lot of otheher peopl,

ifif you have a drought fofor 23 years and the water g gets salt, i bet they die. we've seen it too many times. >> the most t recent period of high mortalities from both diseases occurred during a 4 year drought between 1999 to 2002. >> during that time, we saw the highest lelevels of both msx and dermo disease of maryland waters on record, and we also saw the highest levels of non-fishing mortalities by maryland chesapeake bay oysters. >> the reason we use the rectum is because that's where you usually see the first signs of dermo disease. >> fortunately, the levels of disease detected in current populations of oysters are relatively low. >> during a full survey, we go to 43 bars, which h are diseseae monitoring bars. this year, we found that disease has been at an extremely low level once again. >> just put them there and... >> unfortunately, there is no

real prevention or cure for the diseaseses. they could come back at any time and wipe out substantial numbers of oysters in the public fishery and in the sanctuaries. >> 98, 6. >> the spat that we produce in the hatchery here in these tanks is grown in such a way that it doesn't leave here with any disease in it. >> when you move the seed oysters from a wild sitee to another site, you're not only moving the oysters, yoyou're moving the parasites that cause oyster disease with i it. our oysters do not carry any of those parasites with them. they' not magic superysteters, bubut at leleast we''ve startem out witith a bettter sittuation. >> disease-free baby oysters may be more resistant to msx and dermo, but they''re not immune. most adult oysters carry some level of disease. there's no way to create a wild oyster that is going to be entirely free of these diseases. what we need to do is think

about management strategies where we will promote the development of natural resistance to these diseases. desigigning sanctuaries, y you , setting aside areasas where the oysters can babasically work tthings out with the p parasite, with minimal human i interferen. >> maryland has one of the most substantial oyster restoration programs in the world, and they deal primarily simply with the maryland portion of the bay. virginia's answer has been to go into oyster aquaculture. so, maryland and virginia have two different approaches, although maryland is now also getting interested in the aquaculture aspect of it. 99% of ththe oyster product that comes out in the world is from cultivating oysters not from fishing them in a natural sense. here, of course, it's, you know, we're still just making the transition from fishery

to aquaculture. >> maryland is very late in getting into this game, primarily because the ststate of mmaryland was very protective of the watermen's traditions and the heritage. the new lease laws s were changd in 2010, and thehe state of maryland began acaccepting neww lease applications.. about 50% of the applications were from watermen, and th continueses to this day. one being g robert t. brown whos the current presiddent of the watermen associaiation in maryland. >> aquaculture, it's a number of people who have started [indistinct]. it's a way where we can keep oysters on the market. it's a way that we help put more oysters into the bays and the rivers to help filter the water. it's a good program. >> scrolled up a load of these freshly picked up oysters. maryland's finest.

>> if we want to eat oysters, we should grow them like we do everything else that we eat. >> ah, there we go. >> we don't go out, and hunt, and gather anymore because there's very few resources that can sustain huntingndnd gathering anymore, and oysters is no exception, and the natutural resource proobably shd be left for its s ecological vae where it belolongs. >> these are farm fields that we're trying to get going. underwater farm fielelds. and farming is a good industry. >> eric wisner and his uncle, mike lindemon, have about 360 acres of leased bottom in the nanticoke river. they dredged the public fishery during oyster season, and harvest oysters from their aquaculture beds the rest of the year. >> for the past 3 years we've been putting around 50 million baby oysters on our leases. and each one of those oysters

has the potential of filtering 50 gallons of water a day, and once when you start doing the math, you start enteringg into the trillions of gallons of water that get filtered just by your little operation. >> starting a lease is extremely challllenging becausese you are tasked with taking bare end bottom and improving it to the point where you can harvest oysters. >> eric wisner had to add 4 inches of substrate before he planted spat on shell in his oyster farm. his investment seems to be payingng off. he s saw some mamarket sized oys in about 18 months. another challenge to restoration for both sanctuaries and aquaculture is shell. at one time there were hundreds of shucking houses in maryland, but today, there are only a handful, and only one year round operation, harris seafood on kent island. >> up until the last 3 years, we sold alll our shell toororn

point, they useded it for their restoration efforts dowown ther. now, in the last 3 years we have moved allll our product to private aquaculture farms. they're buying that shell to premium. >> 4 years ago, we wewe able to buy all the oystter shell we wanted for the state of maryland for 25 cents a bushel. ouour costs in that time pererid have g gone from 25 cents a busl to $2 a bushel. we are in such short supply for oyster shells that as projected now, we will run out of oyster shells in this state in about 3 years, and we'll be forced to shut down the state's oyster hatcheries. >> one of the most valuable commodities that w we have right now in the oystster industryy isis the shell. >> in its natural life cycle, the oyster spends around 3 weeks swimming around and at the very end of that process, actually, develops a little foot, and it-- at that point in its life stage, will start to drop to the bottom of the bay and look for areas to attach, typically that would be

other shells from--in an oyster reef. in aquaculture, we can give it a substitute oyster shell in the form of these tiny little pieces of shell. each of these are probably only about 5 times larger than the larvae itself. and because the shell chip is so small, when it grows up, it's basically a single individual oyster. >> we're going to was this--this microcorch which is a 300 micron in size down through this 500 micron screen, and the oysters that are--have grown larger than 500 microns will set on this screen while the shell just goes through, so we'll [indistinct] off the oysters from the shell. so what we're doing here isis jt washing right on through here. once all the shell gets washed through all we'll have left are the oysters themselves.

>> dr. allen is revered for developing the triploid oyster. a sterile oyster that doesn't become thin and watery in the summer months like a reproductive oyster does. >> oysters have been described as reproductive machines inside two shells, and so, if we can shut down that reproductive mechanism, we can get the oyster to devote that otherwise rereproductive energy into beina robust and meaty oyster. >> so, what that does for us as an industry is, first of all, it gives us an extraordinary oyster. it's 30 to 50% higher meat yield. it grows so fast that those diseases, really, don't have time to kill it. and it doesn't spawn so it's available year round for consumption and for sale. >> ecology and culture often clash when it comes to managing oysters. when you come right down to it, watermen, scientists, and everyone who lives in the

chchesapeake bay watershed, all want the same thing, a teeming, healthy, sustainable bay. oyster restoration is one giant step toward that goal. >> "spat" is the title of my film and that's appropriate for my film because ththere certainy isis a spat between the e watern and the scientists onon how we manage oysters.s. the watermen want to fish to earn a livining. the scientists, on the other hand, are very dedicated to bringing back the oysters on the bay. we want to support the watermen, and we want to support aquaculture, and we want everyrybody to love oystersrs because the m more they love oyststers, they'll care about them, anand they'll care about e bay and want to know more about how we cacan protect them. i guess what i was trying to say in this film was that everything we do on n the bay,

everything we eat, everything we harvest has a purpose, and i want this bay to be healthy, , i want it to be teeming with life, and ii want it to be welelcoming and there forever f for many genenerations.s.