If oyster farms ever succeed in Maryland, and start making money for farmers, they might look a lot like the Choptank Oyster Company, a farm that is already growing oysters and already making money for itself and a name for its products. Located on a hook of land where LeCompte Bay meets the mainstem of the Choptank River, the farm spreads out along both sides of a long pier, with thousands of floating rafts, thousands of white-ringed rectangles holding dark green bags of oysters.
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One day in 1979, a young grad student was sitting hunched over a microscope in the attic of a hatchery when he realized he had created a new kind of oyster, an oyster nature had never designed. Thirty-one years later Standish Allen still remembers the moment: he was counting chromosomes through a microscope in an unfinished attic with sawdust on the floor. He was seeing, for the first time, a baby oyster with extra chromosomes. more . . .