Timothy B. Wheeler and Jeremy Cox
It’s the best of times in recent memory for Chesapeake Bay oysters. It’s just the opposite, though, for the Maryland and Virginia watermen who make a living harvesting them.
The bay’s oysters have recovered from the MSX and Dermo diseases that decimated the population a little more than two decades ago. Recent reef surveys found them more abundant and fecund than they’ve been since the diseases hit in the late 1980s…