The Choptank River appears brown-green, choppy, and slightly metallic in the light on a rainy morning, just like it always does in late spring. While two underwater drones hum across the riverbed, a graduate student named Keshav Rajasekaran is bent over a laptop, his T-shirt tied around his head like a hood, trying to keep the screen readable. He’s trying to find oysters. He continues to find sand. As you watch him work, it’s difficult not to consider how much unseen infrastructure lies beneath that one annoying sentence: “sand, sand, sand,” and how a century-old food safety system contributes to the final catch’s suitability for consumption.
The National Shellfish Sanitation Program was established in the 1920s after a series of typhoid outbreaks linked to raw oysters scared people away from the half-shell for years. Maryland was there from the start, with its rivers, bays, and watermen. The state was aware that it stood to lose a great deal. In its most basic form, the agreement has hardly changed: states monitor their own waters, the FDA conducts state audits, and oysters that end up at a restaurant in Baltimore or a fish counter in Denver are meant to be able to be traced back to a particular patch of bottom on a particular tide.
It’s not a glamorous job. It includes lab reports, water samples, and classification maps that indicate which areas are restricted, prohibited, conditionally approved, and approved. Even now, there’s a stubbornly analogous quality to it. Docks are still walked by inspectors. Bushels are still pulled open by them. They continue to record things in writing. However, the oyster industry in the Chesapeake most likely would not have survived the twentieth century, much less the current year, without that tedious, repetitive, and largely unappreciative oversight.
Because it’s having an incredible year by all standards. The 2025 spat count, which measures the number of baby oysters settling on reefs, was approximately six times higher than the long-term average, according to Governor Wes Moore. This is the second-highest reading in the 41-year history of the modern fall survey.
The level of biomass has reached a 33-year high. Dermo and MSX disease pressure, which devastated the fishery in previous decades, is remarkably low. The mortality rate is among the lowest ever. Although scientists tend to be more cautious, pointing out that oyster populations have always been cyclical and that a single banner year does not reverse decades of loss, there is a temptation to call this a turnaround.
Nevertheless, both the numbers and the chain of custody around them are important. As filter feeders, oysters retain the contents of the water. The sanitation program exists because of this biology, which also explains why Maryland’s involvement in it isn’t ceremonial. Someone needs to determine whether the water surrounding those bars is safe enough to harvest from when a sanctuary in the St. Marys River posts more than 2,100 spat per bushel. Someone must attest that the dealer who shucks the oysters did so under terms approved by a federal auditor when watermen extract $18 million annually from the bay. The connective tissue is the program.
Speaking with those who work in this field gives me the impression that the partnership has outlasted most institutions that are a century old. Yes, it is bureaucratic. It may be sluggish. However, when refrigeration evolved, Vibrio became a summertime concern, and aquaculture developed from a curiosity into a significant portion of the industry, it bent with the science. Drones, machine learning, and the kind of precision-farming equipment Miao Yu’s team is experimenting with on the Choptank have caused it to bend once more. The robots will improve. The water will continue to change. Somehow, the 1925 handshake is still effective.
