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 could 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. it's a complicated situation. >> 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 expanding the bay's oyster population was to establish and protect a network of continuous oyster sanctuaries throughout 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 was 75% of the most productive bottom that 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 opened up when you have new market, like just before thanksgiving for your thanksgiving orders, and for 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 development of the 3 dimensional reefs that you would get over 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 you need to mix in a consideration for the fisheries

and a consideration for the ecosystem. >> i understand watermen's frustration of seeing areas that they can't work to have oysters, 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 public resource it has to be managed for everybody, not just for a select few people. >> oysters are important from a commercial point of view. they've sustained a fishery, they've sustained livelihood for people for hundreds of years now. they're also extremely important ecologically. >> sadly, 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 trying to achieve an increase in the oyster population which will result in an increase in the ecosystem services provided by 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 in chesapeake bay is nitrogen and phosphorous that come from a variety of sources and what they 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 large volume of the bay in the deeper water that has no oxygen or insufficient oxygen to support

higher life, we call it the dead zone, and this can be up to 40% of the volume of the bay in the summer, so this is a severe assault to the system. >> so the oysters are removing that algae, clearing up the water that lets sunlight 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 power 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'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 targeted tributary was harris creek in talbot county on maryland's eastern shore. the plan calls for restoring 377 acres of oyster reefs in harris creek at a cost of 31 million 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'm not aware of any oyster hatchery for this species of oyster that's ever been able 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 containerized by the oyster recovery 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 survey is tremendously encouraging. 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 winter 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 the disease came in and killed the oysters that we had, 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 msx and 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 and a lot of other people, if you have a drought for 2 or 3 years and the water gets salty, i bet they die. we've seen it too many times. >> the most 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 levels 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 are disease 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 these diseases. 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 site to another site, you're not only moving the oysters, you're moving the parasites that cause oyster disease with it. our oysters do not carry any of those parasites with them. they're not magic super oysters, but at least we've started them out with a better situation. >> 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. designing sanctuaries, you know, setting aside areas where the

oysters can basically work things out with the parasites, with minimal human interference. >> 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 the 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 state of maryland was very protective of

the watermen's traditions and the heritage. the new lease laws were changed in 2010, and the state of maryland began accepting new lease applications. about 50% of the applications were from watermen, and that continues to this day. one being robert t. brown who is the current president of the watermen association 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 hunting and gathering anymore, and oysters is no exception, and the natural resource probably should be left for its ecological value where it belongs. >> these are farm fields that we're trying to get going. underwater farm fields. 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

08/28/23 08/28/23 [captioning made possible by democracy now!] amy: from new york, this is democracy now! >> i have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed. we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. amy: 60 years ago today,