. >> 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 ht ithe 23 years tha 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? diminishing harvests, it's easy to assign blame to watermen for over fishing, and no doubt there was a gold rush on oysters for centues. 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 dease came in and killed the oysters that we had, it wiped it out. >> two protozoan parasites are major pathogens of oysters in