They won't, or can't or simply don't believe the waters that have always provided their living have become less hospitable so quickly.
"This isn't fun anymore," said Gary Cottrell, a lifelong Ocean Township resident who has crabbed in the bay for 38 years.
Pat Lauer, of Barnegat Township, has bought and sold clams nearly her whole life.
"It's kind of a dying industry," Lauer said of clamming, even as more land-based industries crowd the bay and affect its ecosystem. But she wouldn't want to go anywhere else she says, noting "this is my home."
Cottrell and Lauer are two of the thousands of people government-types call "stakeholders" in the bay. Whether they pluck sustenance from the bottom, skim across the surface or deal in property with a bay view, these are people who pay close attention to the bay's health.
And, as the bay continues to decline, so does their livelihood.
As more development and industry come to the water's edge in the Barnegat Bay, the concentration of chemical nutrients increases in a process called eutrophication. The estuary is becoming saltier, too, as less fresh water comes in.
All this makes the bay ever harder for wildlife to survive in.
Clams, for instance, have declined 99 percent since the late 1970s, marine scientist Mike Kennish said. And while the shores of Barnegat Bay were only 19 percent developed in 1971, Kennish says that figure is now 33 percent.
"It's just progressively gotten worse," Kennish said. "It's sort of like follow the bouncing ball: follow the people and see the impacts they make."
Kennish has been studying the bay for 20 years, both at the Jacques Cousteau Coastal Center in Tuckerton and at Rutgers University. Emotion doesn't guide his work, but he's no disinterested bystander.
"My judgments are strictly on the data," he said. "It's just disturbing to know because I see an environment being degraded. Some people probably wouldn't care less if you had a mud puddle out here, as long as you could JetSki on it."
More development on the shores means more pollutants in the water, and some observers - Kennish among them - have long been concerned about the Oyster Creek nuclear plant's environmental effect.
To the south, Great Bay is in better shape, Kennish said. It sits between the Mullica River and the Little Egg Inlet, and its lack of development has preserved the environment.
In Barnegat Bay, Kennish said an overload of nutrients is apparently spawning more jellyfish - bad for swimming - while hurting flounder populations. Crabs are struggling, too.
"In my first five years, guys ran about 60, 70 traps and would catch 15 to 20 bushels a day," the 60-year-old Cottrell said. "Today, you couldn't catch 20 bushels with 300 traps."
The bad math doesn't stop there for Cottrell. Someone stole three or four traps from him in the first week of July.
"That happens all the time. I lose 30 to 50 traps a year, at $25 a trap," Cottrell said. "I don't really want to catch them in the act because I don't think I'd be able to control my temper."
Steve Camburn came to clamming a year ago to supplement his union-carpenter income as construction jobs dwindled.
"My family's been making a living on the bay for 100 years," said Camburn, 39, of Ocean Township.
On a recent hot Wednesday morning, Camburn took his 19-foot Carolina skiff and his clam rake out. He repeatedly dragged the rake along the shallow bay floor and pulled it up, more often finding hunks of black woolly bay detritus - a relatively recent scourge - than clams.
The final count was 125 clams.
"I clammed for two hours and that's all I got. It's pitiful, and I tried three different spots where I always find clams," Camburn said.
The low turnout wasn't entirely unexpected; Camburn and Lauer said heat drives clams lower in the bay floor, making them more difficult to catch. Still, even an average daily haul nowadays is 500 to 600, where it used to be 2,000 or 3,000.
Lauer, 60, started clamming on her grandfather's sneakbox, a small wooden boat, when she was 8. Arthritis keeps her land-bound these days, but her wholesale and retail business is still going.
"We just take it day by day. As long as the men are able to get clams and I can buy clams, I'll do it," Lauer said. "You don't make much money, but all my bills are paid."
Other industries are also being affected.
Real estate agent Mike Zsoldos doesn't rely on the bay for his whole income. He says bayfront properties are a small percentage of his business and these days, that's a good thing.
"I think it's worse than most real estate now," Zsoldos said. "I don't see any rebound anytime soon."
An Ocean Gate resident, Zsoldos lived in Barnegat Township for a long time and wants to move back. He wishes he could afford to focus more on the bay, but a bayside vacant lot there hasn't gotten any offers in six months, "and it's the lowest priced one around."
Seeing wildlife is important to some buyers, less so to others, especially those from big cities.
"I'm hearing more feedback on lawn fertilizer going into the bay," Zsoldos said. "This is why we have the problems in the bay."
Lauer worries less about pollution than about the nonindigenous plants that clog the bay and make it harder to pull up clams. And even though there seem to be fewer clams, she worries there will soon be too few clammers.
"All the old-timers passed on, and the young kids are too busy looking at the computer," Lauer said. "You just don't know what the future's going to be."
Carmen Stage and her husband have owned New Jersey Kayak in Barnegat Township for 10 years, after she had worked at a hair salon and he at a television network. Even when the kayak business is stressful, they say "it's still better than being locked up in an office."
Many of their customers shove off to look for wildlife. Unfortunately, the egrets and ospreys and blue herons are elusive these days.
"People, when they come out there, they want to know where the birds are, so yeah, (the bay environment) does affect us," Stage said. "There's not as many as when we first opened up. Now, its here and there."