In “The History of the Colony of Nova Caesaria, or New Jersey,” the historian Samuel Smith quotes a letter from an early colonist about the “abundance of brave oysters” populating the local waters. Back then, oyster reefs covered three hundred and fifty square miles of the Hudson-Raritan Estuary. Wild oysters still grow in the area, on old tires, rubble, and boats—though not in anything that could be described as abundance. And they have to be braver than ever to do so: when the first oyster growth projects in New York City were launched, in 1997, the oysters planted in the Gowanus Canal were thought to have been eaten by rats.
Tiffany Medley, a doctoral student in biology at CUNY, has spent two years surveying every cranny of the estuary for signs of wild-oyster colonies, and she has found dozens of sites where oysters have settled, including near the George Washington Bridge. “It was like a miracle to find that,” she said the other day.
Medley was a presenter at the Restoring the Urban Oyster conference, on Governors Island, where, earlier this summer, politicians, environmentalists, artists, and other mollusk enthusiasts came together for a series of panels, lunch, and some informal bivalve-themed networking. Topics of conversation ranged from improving oyster habitats (one theory involved using an electric current to stimulate the creation of underwater limestone for the oysters to grow on) to methods of keeping students who are monitoring oysters “from sinking into the muck of Newark Bay.” But all the presentations shared a common goal: to provide a “hopeful new beginning for the Eastern oyster, Crassostrea virginica,” as a handout put it.
Among their many nifty qualities—the ability to change sex, seemingly at random, and to turn a piece of grit into a pearl—oysters act as natural water-purification systems. “Think of oysters as the catalytic converter on your car,” Fabien Cousteau, the grandson of Jacques Cousteau, explained. One adult oyster can filter up to twenty-four gallons of water in a day, and so the crew at Governors Island looked at the species less as a delicacy awaiting a dollop of cocktail sauce than as a potential environmental savior for New York Harbor.
Cousteau, an undersea explorer and a self-described “tech weenie,” was overseeing a group of teen-agers at the end of a newly built dock on the north end of the island. They were students from the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School, a public high school whose curriculum is organized around bodies of water in the New York area. (They learn celestial navigation alongside algebra.) The kids clustered around a boxlike plywood structure, with tires affixed to its sides and fly mesh instead of a floor. It looked like a woodshop experiment gone wrong, but it was actually a FLUPSY (Floating Upweller System), a piece of commercial oyster-farming equipment that had been built by Peter Malinowski, a young aquaculture teacher at the Harbor School. Malinowski explained that he had grown up on an oyster farm on Fishers Island, and he built the FLUPSY over the course of the previous two months at a floating bar called the Frying Pan, on the Hudson River.
Malinowski held up a bag filled with what looked like Grape-Nuts but were actually a hundred thousand baby oysters, about to be planted in the FLUPSY. Harbor School students will monitor the oysters’ growth, and with luck, Malinowski said, adult oysters will be breeding in the Hudson by next summer.
The school’s current campus is in Bushwick, Brooklyn, an hour from the closest body of water. (Murray Fisher, the school’s founder, recalled that when he told a local that he was starting a Harbor School in the area her response was “Ain’t no harbor in Bushwick, sweetie.”) But next year the school will move to Governors Island, where it will occupy the former Coast Guard hospital and the small-boat station. Kylel Diggs, a freshman, was excited about the new location—“especially for parent-teacher conferences,” he said.
Jennifer Soto, a senior, recalled the only unpleasant memory from her freshman-year Introduction to New York Harbor class: “We had to eat an oyster!” (She had doused hers in lemon juice.) The curriculum, however, won’t include any New York Harbor oyster feasts. If the baby oysters do their job removing toxins from the water, they’ll be dangerous to eat.
Back on the dock, Cousteau watched as the students milled around the FLUPSY. “We can’t use the oceans as an infinite resource and as a garbage can,” he said, looking out across the harbor. After a moment, he added, “Well, actually, we can’t do either.” ♦