Mr. Caputo blames the film for not blaming commercial watermen as the culprit in killing off oysters on the world’s greatest oyster grounds. “It wasn’t overfishing, as one might expect,” he writes. That’s an odd assertion since the film’s narration states: “According to scientists, overfishing helped kill off oysters in Chesapeake Bay.” An on-screen scientist lays it out this way: “The great reefs have been broken down and scattered by heavy fishing, thousands of acres have been buried by sediment.”

Mr. Caputo also says that scientists want to bring back oysters for their ecological benefits, implying they have no interest in any economic payoff from a restored oyster harvest. Wrong again. If he talked to many of the scientists who actually work on oyster research, he would find they have hopes of reviving a commercial oyster harvest, probably through oyster aquaculture. Their research, after all, has been well funded in large part because the old oyster fishery was important to the economy and culture of so many tidewater fishing towns.

The film’s weakness, according to this review, is “its moderate approach to the problem.” If “moderate” means not piling all the blame for decline on one bad actor, say watermen, then I plead guilty. It is not just overfishing that is killing off oysters, not just sediment, not just pollution, not just disease. The loss of the Chesapeake’s great reefs is a complex tale, a tragedy in which watermen and scientists and oyster farmers all played leading roles. All fell prey to hubris, and over time the great reefs came crashing down.

Human conflict is a key element in story telling, and labeling good guys (scientists) and bad guys (watermen) helps ramp up the conflict. But in this case it would oversimplify a long history and a complicated science story. I always thought good science writing tried to clarify complexity without oversimplifying it.

Here’s the statement that bothered me the most: “Fincher (sic) goes through great pains not to point fingers.” Yet my film clearly identifies overfishing and foreign oysters as key causes for decline. It names the specific scientist who first tried planting Japanese oysters in East Coast waters. And it names and quotes a specific oyster grower who planted them in Chesapeake Bay. It also states that a number of other scientists and oyster growers were experimenting with Japanese oysters. That seems fairly straightforward finger pointing.

Here’s some more finger pointing: My name is misspelled. The Latin species name for the oyster is miscapitalized (it should read virginica, not Virginica). The film does not show a scientist planting Japanese oysters in Chesapeake Bay in the 1960s; instead it shows an oyster grower. Why does he say the film features a “bizarre cast of characters?” Why wasn’t this review edited before being displayed on this web site?

It is a surprise to find such an error-filled review on a site associated with Smithsonian magazine. And it’s disappointing that neither Smithsonian.com nor Mr. Caputo extended the courtesy of notifying me about this article, a courtesy other publications, such as The Washington Post, have displayed. Had I been notified I would have responded much earlier.

Are online blogs exempt from the traditional professional practices of fact checking and proofreading? Perhaps that’s my “moderate approach” popping up again.