Tommy Zinn dipped hand tongs into the water of a Patuxent River tributary on an early October morning and waited for the heads to scrape shell.
Holding the end of the tongs like two long rakes pinned together, Zinn gave a few pumps of his arms — as if using a fence post digger — and scooped a cluster of oysters from the riverbed.
After depositing the clumps in a bushel basket, he went to work with a culling hammer, separating oysters from the cluster while tapping the shells and listening for the hollow sound that indicates the oysters inside are dead — known to watermen as "box."
On this day, there were far too many box oysters in the sampling dredged up by Zinn, the president of the Calvert County Watermen's Association and a part-time crabber and oysterman for decades.
"It looks like we've had at least a 50 percent dead loss from being stressed out over the summer," Zinn said of the 11 million young oysters, called spat, that the association planted in August 2007 as part of a partnership with the nonprofit Oyster Recovery Partnership and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Horn Point Laboratory in Cambridge.
That's bad news for aquaculture and for the state, which is hoping to bring a new way of harvesting oysters to skeptical watermen who have done things the old way for generations.
Traditional aquaculture conjures up images of salmon farms. Indeed, Maryland's fledgling oyster aquaculture industry includes companies that grow oysters in racks or cages near the water's surface or on the shoreline. The effort can be costly, both in time and money.
Large-scale, state-backed efforts at oyster aquaculture have focused on growing oysters the natural way, in less-controlled conditions out in the wild. This method uses spat on shell and replenishes existing oyster bars for harvesting the way watermen have done it for centuries.
The marriage of watermen and state bureaucrats isn't a happy one, with state Department of Natural Resources officials and watermen each acknowledging resistance and mistrust on the part of the watermen.
But, officials say, the marriage is necessary. Maryland's oyster harvest was about 4 million bushels a year at the turn of the 20th century, according to the Maryland Department of the Environment. Today, it is about 100,000 bushels a year.
If growing oysters was profitable, watermen would be doing it, the watermen say. They worry that the state wants to turn the Bay's oyster fishing over to big business and leave them in dry dock.
For their part, fisheries officials say the watermen need to transition to a new way of doing business or risk being left behind.
From hunting to farming
Zinn doesn't see many watermen taking the bait.
Watermen are set in their ways, scouring the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries using hand tongs and dredging equipment and selling their catch in the cash-only trade of the wholesale market.
"The state is sort of forcing it on them," Zinn said. "The blue-collar watermen aren't fully grasping it. They don't like to do paperwork. They don't like the IRS. They don't trust DNR."
At 62, Zinn is better off than most watermen, who often have neither Social Security nor health insurance. He retired 18 years ago with a pension from a career as a Prince George's County firefighter, where shifts of 24 hours on and 72 hours off left days free to supplement his income with fishing.
"I'm not a waterman; I just represent 'em," he said.
Mike Naylor knows that many watermen often see DNR officials like him as pencil-pushing desk jockeys who are out of touch with life on the water.
"There's always, within the watermen's community, great resistance to change, unless the change is demonstrated to be [for] the better," said Naylor, who oversees the agency's shellfish program.
The transition to aquaculture has happened more quickly in other parts of the world, including in Virginia.
"We are one of the last estuaries where shell fishing is dominated by wild harvest," Naylor said.
The resistance to change is as much about culture as it is about industry.
With only protected sanctuaries to limit where they can fish, oystermen go where they want, seeking out the best spot. With aquaculture, watermen are tied to a spot, tending to oyster beds in a certain area.
"It's like asking a hunter to become a farmer," Naylor said.
Zinn calls it something else.
"It's basically an experiment, is all I can say," Zinn said of the Oyster Recovery Partnership and Horn Point aquaculture program, to which the association has contributed $10,000 of its own money.
"Look, they all died," he said of the box oysters. "We had no control over them. And it's not going to work. Don't invest your money in it, because we don't see it working.
"But if we can use our funds from our association, the guys don't have to dig out of their pocket," he continued. "And if it does work, it could provide a little bit of income."
Fishing for answers
DNR estimates the Bay's oyster population to be about 1 percent of its original size.
As recently as the 1980s, the Bay still yielded ample harvests. But an early-1990s outbreak of the parasitic diseases MSX and Dermo ravaged the population, putting many shucking houses and watermen out of business.
As a natural filter, oysters once removed 133 million pounds of nitrogen from the Bay annually. Today's population removes only about 250,000 pounds.
A DNR report released in January showed some good news, however: Oyster mortality rates fell for the fourth straight year in 2007, though preliminary 2008 data showed that reproduction was poor throughout the Bay region.
Last spring, after a four-year $15 million study, Maryland, Virginia and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided against a proposal to introduce Asian oysters into the Bay.
Zinn was among those who believed the larger, heartier Asian species could have helped restore oysters to the Bay without harming the ecosystem.
So without Asian oysters, what is the answer?
"Clean up some of these sewage treatment plants," Zinn said.
Maryland has 420,000 septic systems. The state has retrofitted about 1,300 with nitrogen-removal technology.
"It seems like not enough progress is being made to control the sewage," Zinn said.
And aquaculture?
"Is it the answer? No, I don't think so," he said. "I don't see anybody getting rich doing this. I don't see anybody making a living doing this."
To see video of Tommy Zinn, president of the Calvert County Waterman's Association, checking on the seeded oysters, visit www.gazette.net/video.
