The towns of Islip and Brookhaven have shellfish seeding programs both to help clean the bay, as mollusks are natural filters, and recreate the quintessential long-lost Long Island job of clam digger. But the results of those and other state and federal efforts are open to debate, along with the future of the bosom that feeds Fire Island.

"The balance of nature has been disrupted, some say irreversibly," said Islip Town Supervisor Phil Nolan at the Fire Island Association's summer meeting in Ocean Beach on July 30.

Nolan recalled the days when one could seemingly walk from boat to boat across a bay choked with baymen who supplied half of the nation's shellfish. This bounty continued until brown tide, a pollutant-fed algae bloom, arrived in the 1980s and quickly suffocated a way of life. Commercial fishermen on the Great South Bay are nearly relics today, while gas prices have leveled the field between recreational sailboats and motorboats.

The New York State Department of Conservation declared the bay, technically an estuary, an "impaired waterway" last year. This designation may allow the state to obtain federal cleanup aid. The Environmental Protection Agency has also designed the Great South Bay a No Discharge Zone, in which boaters are barred from dumping both treated and untreated sewage into the water.

Islip is testing a program this summer that leases acre plots on the bay bottom to local aquaculturists for $750 a year to cultivate bay scallops, hard clams, American oysters, blue mussels, and both soft shell and razor clams.

Brookhaven's hatchery initiative is newer than Islip's, but both incorporate local high school and college programs to further research. Other townships across Long Island that continue to struggle with the same issue have instituted similar measures.

These efforts are widely considered marginally effective at best—Brookhaven even issued a moratorium on new shell fishing licenses last year. A new law that clarifies the permit process for fishermen has made business a little easier for clam diggers who ply the surf and harvest ocean quahogs. Some had previously been required to operate separate boats for separate harvests.

"In a time when our fishing and clamming industries in the Great South Bay are seeing a decline, this is an opportunity for the state to promote efficiency, consolidation and small business," said state Sen. Lee Zeldin (R-Shirley).