John Consoli stands on the edge of his pier, which juts out from the southern tip of Maryland's Kent Island and into the Chesapeake Bay. He leans over and hoists a mesh the size and shape of a pillowcase out of the water.
It's packed with oysters. He manages to get it onto the pier. "These are brand new oysters from this year," he says. "When I got them, they weighed nothing. And this is just three months of growth. The net is chock full, I can hardly pull it up."
Once he gets his breath back, Consoli marvels at these molluscs. "I think I'm more enthusiastic about something that's like a rock than anybody else could possibly be," he says with a big grin. "I really can't think of many more creatures that do the good that oysters do."
Oysters underpin the Chesapeake's coastal and estuarine ecosystem. Each adult filters up to 50 gallons of water a day. Cleaner water leads to a healthier bay and more sea grass. "That helps crabs and other organisms," says Consoli.
Plus, oyster shells are a habitat unto themselves. "Because of all the nooks and crannies," he explains, "a lot of small fish and crabs live and eat amongst them and hide, so it creates a biodiverse environment. I even found a seahorse, which was incredible. I've never seen a seahorse in my life!"
Robots scanning for oysters
Oyster reefs used to abound in the Chesapeake, but overharvesting decimated their ranks — by over 99% by 2011, according to one estimate. This monumental shift in the bay contributed to poorer water quality and less habitat for other species.
Oyster farming in the Chesapeake has expanded in recent years, despite environmental and disease challenges, says Ryan Carnegie, a biologist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. He adds that wild oysters have also made a partial comeback, helped by better management and investments in restoration. But, says Elizabeth North, a fisheries oceanographer at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, "current oyster populations are likely still a fraction of these historic populations."
Consoli's goal, therefore, is to be a caretaker of sorts, stocking the bay with ever more oysters and looking after their wellbeing. He floats them just below the surface where he says the nutrients are concentrated to help them grow quickly. And although his oysters aren't intended for eating, a cleaner bay does mean better habitat for those that are harvested commercially.
Consoli came to oyster conservation in a roundabout way: He's a professional photographer at the University of Maryland and he was doing a shoot involving the campus's oyster research — namely, efforts to understand and support oyster reefs.
"Seeing great minds coming together to solve problems showed to me that there's a real need here," he says.
Miao Yu is one of the great minds who inspired Consoli that day. She's a mechanical engineer at the University of Maryland who has observed that despite the recent, modest gains in oyster abundance, farmers continue to face two daunting tasks — both of which are stymied by the bay's murky waters.
The first is knowing where to plant the babies. A young oyster needs to settle upon a hard substrate. But finding that ideal spot is much easier said than done. "Sometimes it's dropped into [the] mud," she explains — where the young oyster suffocates and dies.
The second task involves figuring out where and when to harvest the adult oysters. "It's the biggest challenge," she says. "We cannot see like a couple feet down there."
This means that the recovery of oysters, often via dredging, tends to be inefficient, and even damaging: It can harm the seabed or pull up oysters that aren't yet ready for harvest.
The fishermen, she says, "don't have a whole picture of what's going on. So our goal is to transform that guesswork into precision."
Yu is trying to do that with the help of robots. She and her team frequently work inside the Neutral Buoyancy Research Facility on campus, which houses a giant cylindrical tank.
On a recent fall morning, one of Yu's PhD students, Michael Xu, uses a joystick to steer a raft-like robot called Oysterbot. Oysterbot, which the team built in-house, consists of a collection of electronics and cables atop a couple of pontoons. A sonar is mounted below.
"We're able to do a large-range scan to get a general view of what's going on down there," says Xu.
The team can also deploy a smaller off-the-shelf robot known as the BlueROV to examine something underwater more closely through a live video feed. Together, the two robots paint a portrait of the seabed.
The lab then uses AI to stitch the visuals together and analyze them "to determine if the oysters are present, how many of them are alive or dead, and how big they are," says Xu.
They're still refining the algorithms, but Yu says the eventual goal is "to turn that sonar image map into an oyster information map." In other words, she wants to provide farmers with actionable intelligence to know when and where to plant and harvest their oysters.
Beyond the Chesapeake, her team has conducted field work along the shoreline of Washington state and the Gulf coast. Yu is hoping that within a decade, the technology could be modified and scaled to coastlines nationwide, "so that we can help the oysters for the entire United States."
Peer to Pier
This interest in aiding oysters elsewhere appeals to Consoli as well. Ever since he got hooked, he can't help but spread the good word to a growing number of neighbors with access to the bay.
"Every time I meet a new person, I ask them, 'Hey, do you like oysters?" he says. "And even if they say no, I say, 'Well, somebody in your family likes oysters. Have to be! You have a brother, uncle, a brother-in-law.'" Once he establishes such a connection, he says to them, "Hey, can you grow them? It's not that hard."
And most of the time, Consoli finds that people are quite receptive. That includes a couple of octogenarian neighbors of his on Kent Island.
"I really am impressed that the oysters clean the bay," says Earl Collins.
On one occasion, Ann Ziegler, who lives a couple doors down from Consoli, says she pulled her oysters out of the water with her family to eat them raw. "And then, at Thanksgiving, since no one had died, we ate them again," she says.
Consoli has also met new neighbors through this work, like John Patrick. "It's just amazing the amount of marine life that I've seen around the pier since I've had these oysters in the water," he says. "I had croaker, crabs and eels in here this morning."
Even Consoli's dental hygienist has gotten involved.
Perhaps most ambitiously, Consoli worked with a local restaurant called Libbey's Coastal Kitchen a couple months ago to place a million baby oysters around their dock pilings.
"We had eight people in wetsuits and life jackets," he says. "There were jellyfish everywhere. It was probably the most difficult installation we could ever do."
Restaurant operator Andrew Westlin says he was instantly attracted to the idea.
"This was a no-brainer for us, honestly," he says. "We felt that this was a cool way for us to give back and just be part of the community." Soon, there will be a sign next to the pier explaining the oyster project to any restaurant customers and passersby.
Consoli's wife, Kathy, says all this oyster work is "the most hardworking hobby there is. I call him now the Pied Piper of oysters because I think he's up to 80 people possibly."
She's right. He calls it his Peer to Pier Network.
"We're really just trying to make sure that we can restore as much as we can to the bay," says Consoli, "whether that's with robots or other techniques… It teaches me just how something that seems so insignificant can make a difference."
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