SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Our next story is about two people, an eco evangelist and an engineer, who are taking different approaches to support the same critical ingredient in the Chesapeake Bay - that's oysters. Here's NPR's Ari Daniel.
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ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: John Consoli stands on the edge of his pier on the southern tip of Kent Island in eastern Maryland, where he's hoisting something out of the water.
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JOHN CONSOLI: Oh, this one's heavy. Hold on. This is when I need my son. Hold on (laughter).
DANIEL: Consoli pulls a mesh the size of a pillowcase onto the pier. It's packed with oysters - not for eating, but rather to be grown to help the bay.
J CONSOLI: When I got them, they weighed nothing. And this is just three months of growth. And just the net is chock-full. I can hardly pull it up.
DANIEL: Can you just kind of give me a tour of...
J CONSOLI: Sure.
DANIEL: ...Your oyster kingdom here...
J CONSOLI: Sure.
DANIEL: ...John?
J CONSOLI: Yeah. Sure.
DANIEL: Consoli marvels at these mollusks.
J CONSOLI: I think I'm more enthusiastic about something that's like a rock than anybody else could possibly be. I mean, I really can't think of many more creatures that do the good that oysters do.
DANIEL: Oysters underpin this ecosystem. First off, each adult filters up to 50 gallons of water a day. Cleaner water leads to a healthier bay for the other creatures here.
J CONSOLI: A lot of small fish and crabs live and eat amongst them and hide. I even found a seahorse, which was incredible. I've never seen a seahorse in my life.
DANIEL: Oyster reefs used to abound in the Chesapeake, but overharvesting decimated their ranks, contributing to poor water quality and less habitat for other species. So Consoli's goal is to be a caretaker of sorts - stocking the bay with ever more oysters and looking after their well-being. It's an interest that began several years ago. Consoli's a photographer at the University of Maryland, and he was doing a shoot involving oyster research on campus.
J CONSOLI: Seeing, you know, great minds coming together to solve problems really showed to me that, hey, there's a real need here.
DANIEL: One of those great minds was mechanical engineer Miao Yu, who says oyster farmers face the daunting twin tasks of knowing where to plant the babies...
MIAO YU: Sometimes it's drop into mud, and then it suffocated and die.
DANIEL: ...And where and when to harvest the adults.
YU: The fishermen - they cannot see.
DANIEL: Because it's really murky.
YU: Yes. It's the biggest challenge.
DANIEL: They basically have to guess where the adult oysters are.
YU: So our goal is to transform that guesswork into precision.
DANIEL: And she and her team are doing that with robots.
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DANIEL: I've met Yu at a facility on campus that houses a giant cylindrical tank. One of her PhD students, Michael Xu, uses a joystick to steer a raft-like robot they call Oysterbot along the water's surface. A sonar is mounted below.
MICHAEL XU: We're able to do a large-range scan to get a general view of what's going on down there.
DANIEL: The team can also deploy a smaller underwater robot...
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DANIEL: ...To examine something more closely. The two together paint a portrait of the seabed. The lab then uses AI to stitch the visuals together and analyze them.
XU: To determine if the oysters are present, how many of them are alive or dead and how big they are.
DANIEL: They're still refining the algorithms, but the goal is to help farmers know when and where to plant and harvest oysters. Miao Yu is hoping that, within a decade, the technology could be modified and scaled to coastlines nationwide.
YU: So that we can help the oysters for the entire United States.
DANIEL: This interest in aiding oysters elsewhere appeals to John Consoli, as well. Ever since he got hooked, he can't help but spread the good word within his community.
J CONSOLI: Every time I meet a new person, I ask him, hey, do you like oysters, and, hey, can you grow them?
DANIEL: Consoli's wife, Kathy, has seen him in action.
KATHY CONSOLI: I call him, now, the pied piper of oysters, because I think he's up to 80 people, possibly.
DANIEL: She's right. That includes neighbors like Earl Collins...
EARL COLLINS: I really am impressed that the oysters clean the bay.
DANIEL: ...And Ann Ziegler, who's eaten some of hers raw.
ANN ZIEGLER: And then at Thanksgiving, since no one had died, we ate them again.
DANIEL: Consoli estimates his network's helped add well over a million oysters back to the Chesapeake.
J CONSOLI: We're really just trying to make sure that we can restore as much as we can to the bay, whether that's with robots or other techniques. It teaches me just how something that seems so insignificant can make a difference.
DANIEL: Ari Daniel, NPR News, Kent Island, Maryland.
(SOUNDBITE OF PAVEMENT'S "5-4=UNITY") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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