Oyster harvests dwindle as experts explore solutions

The sun is barely peeking over the banks of the Chester River, but already watermen are busy at work on a frigid Saturday morning.

Divers plunge into the choppy, deep gray water in search of the increasingly hard-to-find Crassostrea virginica - the native Chesapeake Bay oyster.

In the depths of the river, the divers pile basket after basket full of market-size oysters. One by one, the baskets are pulled aboard workboats, the oysters are sorted and the baskets thrown back.

In less than three hours, several boats have caught their limit of 10 bushels per man.

It's rare these days to harvest so many oysters so...