By Lyndsey Layton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 3, 1998; Page M01

Scientists trying to figure out why disease has devastated the oysters that once filled the waters around Southern Maryland are relying on an unlikely band of volunteers for help.

Schoolchildren, retirees, families and even Navy officials scattered throughout Calvert, Charles and St. Mary's counties are helping the Academy of Natural Sciences to monitor the health of oysters.

Since January, 68 volunteers have been measuring and checking the health of oysters in stainless steel baskets suspended from 21 private piers up and down the Patuxent River. Once a month, the volunteers haul in their baskets of 100 oysters and check on the health and size of each oyster.

"I love oysters and anything I can do to help find out whatever is wrong with them I want to do," said Roy Evans, 64, a computer specialist retired from the federal government who lives in Lusby. "I live on the water and I used to pick them up, they were so plentiful. Now, it's different."

Evans and his wife, Kathleen, walk to the end of their wooden pier on the last day of each month and hoist up the basket of oysters. He methodically fits each oyster in a white plastic caliper and calls out its length to his wife, who writes it down. They send the measurements to the academy.

Across the water, in the Mechanicsville section of St. Mary's County, Betty Brady's fourth- and fifth-graders from Hollywood Elementary School descend on a pier owned by Henry and Nancy Virts. The children run to the end of the dock and pull up their oysters.

"Oooh, there's a baby crab!" says Rebecca Pratt, 11, as she and four other students crowd at the pier's edge and pick through the mud-coated oysters. They take turns measuring with calipers and recording the data.

The children closely inspect the shellfish that fit in their palms, picking off stray sea worms and running their small fingers over the barnacles attached to the oyster shells. Alfredo Niklitschek, 10, of California, surreptitiously paints his cheeks with a muddy oyster.

"Children like to do things that they know are for real," said Brady, whose students are monitoring oysters at two piers in the county. "It empowers them, makes them feel worthwhile."

In Charles County, Patrick Connelly and David Hance and their sons hover over a similar pile of oysters on the pier outside Chappelear's Restaurant. The restaurant owners offered use of their pier and Connelly, 54, an engineer from Prince Frederick, and his son, Christopher Tymeson, 13, check the oysters each month.

Their friends, the Hances, monitor a basket at Jefferson Patterson Park in St. Leonard. "I've learned quite a bit about the diseases that affect oysters," said Hance, 43, an engineering technician from Huntingtown.

Hance and sons Keith, 14, and Andrew, 11, have grown enthusiastic about the project over time, toting more equipment each month. They now bring their own calipers from home, instead of the plastic one supplied by the academy, folding stools, a bucket and ponchos in case of rain, David Hance said.

George Abbe, a senior scientist at the academy, said he was surprised by the number of volunteers.

The region's oyster industry collapsed in the late 1980s because of the rapid spread of dermo, a disease that kills oysters by attacking their digestive systems. At the peak of the oyster trade in the 1880s, about 15 million bushels of oysters were plucked from the Chesapeake Bay and its surrounding waters. Last year, about 200,000 bushels were harvested, Abbe said.

Dermo, whose origins are unknown, has spread to all oyster beds in the bay and the Patuxent River. But the level of disease can vary significantly from one bed to another. To understand why, and to figure out the best conditions for oyster growth, Abbe and his colleague, Brian Albright, launched the oyster study.

They sought volunteers simply to keep costs down, Abbe said. But that approach has brought unexpected benefits, scientists and volunteers say.

"There are enough people along the river who realize the oysters are in trouble, not just in the Patuxent but the whole state of Maryland," said Abbe, who has been studying oysters in the river for 30 years. "They realize they can help make an effort to learn more about it and maybe reverse the trend over the last 30 years. It's fantastic that they want to do this."

The academy is a private, nonprofit institution founded in Philadelphia in 1812 for environmental research, education and outreach. Its estuarine research center is based in St. Leonard in Calvert County.

Chris Tymeson said that working on the oyster project has given him thoughts about becoming a marine biologist. "It's fun, we're out on the water one day a month and the water's really beautiful," Tymeson said. "We get to learn about a lot of different wildlife and about the oysters -- how the salinity and temperature affect their growth and how they can get diseases that can't be caught by humans."

The trade-off in using volunteers may be in the accuracy of measurements, Abbe said. The children from Hollywood Elementary, for instance, had to measure their oysters four times this week because they incorrectly counted them.

But that's also a valuable lesson for the children, Brady said. "I told them we had to do it over and that it can be frustrating, but that's what real scientists do, to make sure their information is correct," she said.

The only major problem so far has been oyster theft. Someone twice stole oysters from the basket at the Navy's recreation center in Solomons, causing scientists to cancel that site, said academy spokeswoman Shannon Briscoe Campbell.

The project continues until December, when Abbe and his colleagues hope to have enough data for a clear picture of oyster disease in the river. And that is the first step toward rebuilding the oyster population, Campbell said.