A basic question in American geography is, what are the two most important bays in the United States?

If you answered San Francisco in the west and Chesapeake Bay in the east, you're correct.

Chesapeake is more important to our history, it is also the more threatened.

But its future is bright, thanks in no small part to our shellfish friends, oysters and clams.

Funding for In The Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnes Haury.

ááOpening Themeáá Chesapeake bay is here because, a little over 30 million years ago a very large meteor slammed into Earth, right here.

It created an enormous bowl, changed the earth's climate for a few hundred years.

That bowl became a basin, and water from the ocean poured in, but so did water from the great number of rivers to the north and west, fresh water, enormous amounts of fresh water, creating the bay which then became, as it has been in recent centuries, one of the greatest marine resources in the world.

One of the defining structures of all of the bay region is this bridge, the Chesapeake Bay tunnel bridge, it's both a bridge and a tunnel, and it's very different from any other bridge.

But it saves 95 miles for people who live in Norfolk, who, say, want to go to New York City or ports north.

But it also gives you a wonderful feel for how vast Chesapeake Bay is.

We know its 200 miles long, but here we are in the state of Virginia and the origin of Chesapeake Bay is north of Binghampton, New York.

That's how great the drainage area, brought on by that massive old crater, back some 30 million years ago.

And so we have this bay, and it is a historic bay, it is probably the most important bay historically in maybe all of the United States, and all of the Americas.

Jamestown colon was founded here, the fishing was beyond belief, the wildlife, the physical resources and natural resources were places that colonists could only dream about, that's changed.

Some people are now trying to work to make the bay what it once was, one of the most productive marine resources in the world.

If you go historically, the Chesapeake Bay was so important to America, because it was really the founding waterbody for the country.

The map that john smith drew up of Chesapeake Bay was really the country's first highway system, and obviously in a lot of ways led to a very strong economy in this region that allowed the country to grow and move west.

So the Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in North America, so it drains about 6400 square miles of the Atlantic coast, parts of six states and the District of Colombia, it is a huge port area, having two large ports on it along the Atlantic coast, Baltimore and Hampton Roads.

It serves as the seafood hub of the Atlantic Coast as well.

For years the Chesapeake bay supplied the vast majority of blue crab catch and lobster catch for the entire Atlantic coast.

For us to appreciate the enormity and complexity of the bay, its best to start with a small producer, an individual whose livelihood depends on the bay.

He's been farming the bay as his parents, his grandparents did before him.

So off to Cherrystone Creek.

I have never been oyster or clam hunting before, commercially.

We're about seven miles south of the tip of the eastern shore, so we have a, you know, decent salt content here, but the further north you go into the bay, it's not so much.

Wintertime is winter, you know, it's ice, it's cold, we're wearing waders, we're still working, we're not putting in the time we put in in the summer hours, summer months, but we're still out here working.

This is, you know, twelve months a year.

The oysters are amazing creatures because, you know, once they freeze, they can actually fall and continue living.

That doesn't kill them?

It kills the clams, but it won't kill the oysters.

It'll kill the clams, but won't kill the oysters.

That's interesting.

It's pretty amazing.

Now, that being said, if you handle the oysters while they're frozen you will kill them.

Right here we're basically on our tidal flats in the area here.

You know, you can go off a little ways and it's over your head, but here it's literally waist deep.

All of our oysters are basically hostage, and we have...

I see.

It's called spat bags, and the spat bags basically hold the oysters until you're ready to either move them into another bag, or harvest.

Now what are they eating as that, as that current carries this stuff back and forth?

Phytoplankton.

Phytoplankton and algae and stuff that they desire to eat.

They filter out of this water and grow.

Pretty much most of the food, they say is in the top 15% of the water column.

Normally we're one or the other, we're either oystering, or we're clamming.

It's not usually this amount of gear in here, but they've asked us to do a couple different things today, harvest oysters and clams, so we'll do a little bit of both.

Bi-valves, such as clams and oysters, mollusks, and barnacles, which we don't eat, but those first three are pretty important parts worldwide of the human diet, and they taste good and they're pretty nutritious.

But they have another function, and that is that they filter water, they actually clean water, and if you take a tank of murky muddy water and put a dozen or so oysters in it, within 24 hours, they will have cleaned that water.

And that has been their function in Chesapeake Bay is to keep that water purified.

Now about 95% of those bi-valves, especially the oysters are gone through pollution, contamination, over-harvesting, just abuse of the bay.

One of the strategies that conservationists and restorationists have is to try to bring oysters back to the numbers that would help purify the bay once again.

This bathtub looking thing is actually part of the sophisticated mechanism for digging up clams, it sure does beat using a shovel or a trowel, but that is a compressor that actually runs jets of water under the clams that have been dug up, cleans them off, until they arrive in the baskets ready to go to the market.

The water here is murky, so we can't see how the beds are laid out, but it's ingenious.

They're laid out in rectangles and covered in netting to keep the predators from getting at those clams, that most predators like them just as much as we do.

But they're rectangular for a purpose, and that is that they can move this harvesting mechanism back and forth in a straight line as though it were a plow, and not miss any of the circular edges, so the rectangle is the ideal shape for making clam beds that you can harvest with this simple but profound mechanism.

I'm just literally going down this, where we had the bags, we have gravel bags that surround the net, cover the net, and they're butt to butt, so that way the crabs and little critters can't get inside and eat the crabs, right?

And then I keep working that way until the bed is finished, harvested totally.

Oysters basically need a winter under their belt, and they need that winter to kind of thicken their shell up, and once they thicken their shell up, you can actually shuck em, you get a nice clean meat with zero brittle in it.

So you want a tough shell You want a tough shell so you can shuck it.

I see.

Yup.

Under the right conditions they grow very fast.

They grow quickly.

The stuff that's too small to sell, we'll re-bag in fresh bags and we'll put back overboard this afternoon.

But the stuff that we can market, we'll go ahead and sell this morning, we have to have them in before 10.

Boy, that's fresh.

This is sort of the finished product of your work.

Yup.

You gotta lay all this infrastructure out.

You have to have the equipment and the gar, the racks, the sleeve cages, the bags, you have to have all that before you have the seed, otherwise you have nowhere to put the seed.

Then you have to lease the land from the state first.

Leasing the land from the state, or the land owner.

You gotta have your ducks lined up a little bit before you get fired up with oysters or clams, it doesn't matter which one.

The mystique of Chesapeake Bay oysters, what is that due to?

I think that it has a lot of history behind it.

You know, this bay has been harvested and harvested and harvested for hundreds of years, it's a huge estuary, and the oysters are just so popular because they're so delicious, some of these creeks are very grassy, and you can actually taste the oyster difference, they're not as salty.

Sea side are more salty than here.

They're very different.

These are actually just over a year old.

There's your shell, there's your meat, what I like to do is rinse the goo off of it.

See how these edges are razor sharp You bet they are.

Okay.

And so what you see here is we've actually beat the edges off, it helps the shell grow down, rather than lengthwise, you want that cup to be deep so you have a nice plump oyster meat in here.

So if it's shallow, that means it's hardly worth the effort opening it.

Pretty much.

The technique is I just slide this in.

Slide it down, chew it up a bit.

I thought you were supposed to have ecstasy sauce on these?

That's actually very good!

It's impressive isn't it?

Yeah, that's impressive.

Okay, you've converted me, I'm now an oyster eater.

Okay, good.

You've changed my life Chris.

I gotta wipe the oyster juice...

If it's just one person, that's all that matters.

Right.

Just one person.

Right, one by one we'll convert humanity.

The health of the bay is threatened by basically three things: too much nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment.

And that does a couple different things.

The sediment clouds the water, covers up our natural habitats, like submersed aquatic vegetation and oysteries.

Nitrogen and phosphorus are fertilizers, which in good amounts are a good thing, but unfortunately lead to algal blooms, which are basically microscopic plants that end up taking habitat away from fish and shellfish.

The pollutants in Chesapeake Bay come from a variety of different sources.

From agricultural operations, from waste water treatment plants, from our lawns, from our roadways, from the sky, from air pollution.

Here on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay, which is also Virginia's eastern shore, cotton is still here in a field of several hundred acres.

And cotton, for all its agronomic sophistication, still resists the high degree of mechanization for other crops, such as corn.

Corn has been raised here for probably thousands of years, but the technology of raising and harvesting corn is vastly different from the way it was among the Indians.

This infernal machine does almost everything that used to be done by hand.

It cuts off the stalk, munches it up, cuts off the cobs, strips the cobs of the leaves, everything that's in the way, strips the kernels off the cobs, drops them below and delivers only corn into a truck that will then be driven off, untouched by human hands.

There's a number of different technologies that farmers use nowadays to determine how to best apply fertilizers and also where the best yields on their farms are going to be.

And those are important pieces of the puzzle so they can better gauge where they need to put fertilizer down, but also maybe in the future where they don't farm anymore and can restore buffers and things like that that can improve water quality.

The technology that's driving farmers to be more productive in a field, is also going to help us drive water quality improvements throughout the watershed as well.

Generally, the changes that we see in Chesapeake Bay is a lack of abundance in oysters, that's number one, number two is a lack of abundance of submerged aquatic vegetation, those are those underwater grasses that protect a lot of the juvenile fish species and blue crabs as they migrate back in the bay.

We used to have many more oyster reefs that actually pierced the surface of the water during the tidal cycle.

We also had SAB protecting most of our shorelines, that submerged aquatic vegetation that provided habitat for a lot of different species, but also protect the shorelines from wave energy and other threats.

Some of the local folks tell us that a nor'easter is coming in, and the tide is coming up very high, but in addition to that storm, Chesapeake Bay is facing a double whammy.

Not only are global seas rising throughout the world and this probably will be permanently flooded, but it sits south of the place where the great glacier covered up to the north.

When that glacier went away, that weight was removed, and now, very slowly, the Chesapeake Bay area is subsiding.

As the ocean is rising, as the big storms are coming in we're going to see a lot more flooding like this, it's inevitable.

While the storm brews to the north, we try to catch up with Chris's clams in their march to the consumers.

Just to check how fresh they are.

In doing so we gain a glimpse at a much larger business, one with roots more than a century old.

In harvesting shellfish, a lot of it is individual or family, but the demand is so great that you also need industrial producers, and Ballard's here in the Cape Charles area have been producing since 1895, so all of this paraphernalia is a reflection of a long term commitment to producing shellfish.

These clams are from the seaside of the eastern shore, from the higher salinity site that we have.

These go to the restaurants somewhere throughout the country.

We ship to major distributors, so all this product right here was harvested today.

That looks almost like the bags we saw Chris collecting this morning.

And it was.

Look at all the information on the bags.

These all obviously got harvested, the data collected off of them, and it was logged in the office, so that way we have full traceability on this product.

So now it's going to get separated in size, so they'll break it down into the four sizes of product that's in there.

Sizing on a clam is measured by the width of the hinge.

Okay.

So like this, not, not like that.

So this is our wet storage system that's in here.

Try to do a minimum of 24 hours, no more than 48.

This is just kind of a little rest period in there, before they're off to the soup and the chowder.

We like to say that it helps them get just a little bit healthier.

The water's always constant at 55 degrees, and it still allows the animals to purge all the sediment that they may have ingested while they were out in the wild.

All the time.

Filter all that in and bring them in here and they spit all that out.

But once they're removed from wet storage, they'll be packed up in the same day and can be in California to one of our customers tomorrow morning.

The sustainability behind what we do is amazing.

Similar to sea ranching, but we're taking aqua cultured animals and putting them back in their natural environment, and then in turn harvesting them for market.

And in that you get cleaner water.

We get cleaner water.

Oysters and clams are a critical element in cleaning up the Bay, equally important is public education, including school children experiencing the Bay in person.

So we're going to pull over up here and get into a little seining look at the biotic factors and find some life out here, and talk about how that can tell us about the quality of water out here on the Lynnhaven River, our connection to the Bay.

Yeah, what's something a fish can do if it doesn't like where it's living?

Leave.

It could swim away, right?

So, would that be safe to say then that if there was a lot of bad pollution or something like that in this water, and there were fish here, they could just swim away and leave?

So if there was a lot of pollution here, we might not find fish here.

So this is a basic test that the kids are going to do in the water to see how many organisms are living in this tiny area, they're going to pull up a seine net, and that'll give them an idea of the abundance of life or the absence of life.

From that they can conclude, is this area a place that is supporting life or is it dead?

Keep coming you guys, keep coming all the way in.

This is a fish cull, it looks like there's probably three different species, all of them small, the longest one's four and a half inches long, but there's at least three different species.

For starters guys, how do you think we did for just two pulls of the same net?

Good.

Really good.

Some of them are more tolerant to pollution than others, we can learn a little about the Lynnhaven River out here and how that connects to the Chesapeake Bay.

So we want to find lots of different types of life out here, okay, that's how we know it's a balanced ecosystem.

So, some critters can't tolerate any pollution, and some can tolerate a lot.

So the lesson is a very broad one in terms of biodiversity and the purity of the water.

They really get a firsthand experience of a hands on learning experience, learn about the water by actually feeling things, they get to touch the fish, they get to touch the crabs, they actually get to take the water quality assessments themselves, so they can get that real personal connection between the water here, what it is here, and how, in turn, they can help out the Bay.

A great example of improvements we've seen in water quality are seen right here in Lynnhaven River.

We've seen an estuary, that at one point back in 2005 was 99% closed to the harvest of shellfish, in this short time we've actually seen that river's water quality improve to such an extent that 42% of the river is open to shellfish, and so that shows you that we've made real strides in reducing bacteria in the water body and its opened up real opportunities for both commercial and recreational harvest of shellfish in the river.

We have spent time with a small time oyster farmer and his employees, now we visit one who prefers to work alone with his canine friends.

This is a Chesapeake Bay retriever.

Come on boy, come here.

And they are bred to not only retrieve, but to dive, and he wants nothing better than to retrieve and dive.

Here you go killer, here you go killer.

He got it.

From here we go across the Bay?

We head across the creek.

Oh, this is a creek.

This is a creek.

Is this freshwater?

No, no this is saltwater.

Alright, but its still a creek.

This is one of the many creeks that feed off the bay.

How does, does Deacon jump up here.

No, he requires a little bit of help.

The white poles that we're seeing, what do they tell us?

Most of them are marking the borders of someone's lease.

Wherever aquaculture is involved all bottom, all sea bottom, is owned by the state, or the various states.

So if you want to do aquaculture, you come out here, you apply for a lease, they'll do a survey.

The poles are typically marking the boundaries of that lease.

We're a true mom and pop operation, people want to know where the food's coming from these days, they want to know, want to know their farmer.

And if I go to Richmond farmer's market I can find your stuff?

We do one market in Richmond, the farmer's market at St. Stevens.

That's our opportunity to get in front of our customers, meet them face to face, and then they're the ones that go to the restaurants, the retail markets and ask for Ruby Salts by name.

To give you a little idea of how oysters work, this one oyster was left sitting on the deck yesterday afternoon when I got done working, so I threw it in this bucket of water that looks just like what is it right there in the creek, full of mud and silt and sediment, and now you see how clean it is.

One oyster filtered that bucket of water overnight.

And it doesn't charge you anything to do that?

No, no, it's perfectly free.

Don't even have to feed him.

You don't need electricity to do that.

I've got my rack set up in 30 foot segments, which is about the length of the boat, so we're actually straddling one rack of bags and oysters with the pontoon boat, and then I've got the two racks on each side that I'm going to work today.

These oysters here, they're probably 18 months, 18 months old.

That's the average time from seed to market size, is about 18 months.

When I purchased this seed, they were closer to the size of a pinky nail, and that was a month ago.

Give you an idea now what you're looking at.

So they've quadrupled in size.

And you've seen what these have done in just a couple of months.

Oh my goodness.

We get to the final product, the ones that we want to buy to eat, these are 18 months old, somewhere in there.

These are triploid which means they're sterile, they do not reproduce, all they do is sit there, eat and grow.

And reproduction interferes with that getting fat.

That's right.

The quality of the meat is maintained year round.

Well I feel that I'm developing a skill that one day may be marketable when other sources of employment dry up, there's always oyster sorting.

I use the bucket to judge the volume before we put them back in the bag.

Proper tasting technique, get a little sip, give it a good sniff, make sure everything smells right, taste the sea, the brine, and then throw it back and slurp it down.

It's quite tasty, and just the right amount of salty.

More than 50 million people live along Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries.

There are tens of thousands of farms along the edge.

There are thousands of towns and cities, and everyday hundreds of massive ships ply the bay up and down.

That's a source of a lot of pollution.

One way of fighting that pollution, as scientists have found is through the humble oyster, it serves us both as a food and as a natural cleaner.

Join us next time In the Americas with David Yetman The sea coast of Colombia is home to one of America's greatest colonial cities.

One that recalls a history of international intrigue.

It is now a source of pride to Colombians.

And to former slaves who escaped, and have founded their own way of life.

In World War II, U.S. military authorities feared that the Germans might enter with their navy and submarines in Chesapeake Bay, giving them direct access up the Potomac river to our nation's capital, Washington D.C.

So they constructed this bunker here at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay.

Funding for In The Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnes Haury.

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