New York Seeks To Claw Back 'Big Oyster' Past

One sunny morning in New York, a dozen biologists and volunteers stand in knee-deep water, chucking net sacks of oyster shells down a human chain, before planting them in containers on the riverbed.

New York, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 25th Sep, 2018 ) :One sunny morning in New York, a dozen biologists and volunteers stand in knee-deep water, chucking net sacks of oyster shells down a human chain, before planting them in containers on the riverbed.

Why? To build an oyster reef.

The goal? To restore a billion oysters by 2035 to America's largest city -- not as a delicacy for the dinner table but in an environmental bid to clean up its notoriously filthy harbor water and generate greater biodiversity.

Dressed in waders, the group battles under the hot morning sun on the Brooklyn shoreline, the Statue of Liberty and iconic skyscrapers of New York's Financial District rising up on the horizon.

The net sacks contain empty oyster shells, or ones that have been assiduously cleaned or "cured" -- then inserted with oyster larvae -- and placed into containers planted on the seabed that will form a reef.

"This was the Big Oyster before it was the Big Apple," jokes Mike McCann, an urban marine ecologist with the non-profit group The Nature Conservancy.

"That's a history that has been forgotten by a lot of New Yorkers and this project brings it back," explains the 32-year-old.

When English explorer Henry Hudson sailed into New York harbor in 1609, he had to navigate 89,000 hectares of oyster reefs that fed Lenape Indians for generations, writes Mark Kurlansky in his 2006 book "The Big Oyster."The Dutch colonialists who followed knew today's Ellis Island and Liberty Island as the Island of the Little Oyster and the Island of the Great Oyster.

"Oysters are ecosystem engineers and they build (a) three-dimensional reef habitat," explains Katie Mosher, restoration manager of the Billion Oyster Project (BOP), which was set up in 2014.