Restoring New York’s Oysters

The end goal of the Electric Oyster Project is to grow a synthetic oyster reef using this method. They hope to electrify all the rebar (the metal that reinforces concrete), dumped here after the 1964* World’s Fair, and coat it in limestone. “Oysters don’t want exotic crap, they don’t want algae, they want good, clean limestone,” says Goreau.

Oysters may need this extra boost from such a solar-powered, synthetic scheme. The beach we’re standing on, much like the Gowanus Canal, was once heavily polluted. Through the years this area has served as a Navy shipyard, an illegal dumping ground for toxic waste, and a sewage treatment plant. Cervino, who grew up in this neighborhood now known as College Point, says that it wasn’t until 15 or 20 years ago that marsh grass would even grow along the shore.

Now you can see marsh grass and a plenitude of red ribbed mussels growing in dense clumps along the shoreline. But no oysters.

Shelling Out Solutions

Improvement to local environments, like College Point or the Gowanus Canal, make oyster-growing seem more feasible. But the plan to restore oysters to their original levels has many hurdles to overcome. Perhaps the biggest challenge is that there simply aren’t enough oysters to create a population that can renew itself without human intervention.

“It’s like trying to push a boulder up a hill. You can hold it in place, but if you let it go it will roll back down. If you reach the top of the hill, the boulder rolls down on its own,” says David Bushek of Rutgers University. He says that the situation is the same with oysters: Once they reach a large enough number, the population should gain enough momentum to sustain itself.

And the oysters will need to replenish their own numbers if they are going to reach a population level where any significant filtering can happen. Roger Newell, an oyster scientist at the University of Maryland’s Horn Point Laboratory, says that billions of oysters would be required for substantial filtering to occur in the Chesapeake Bay, where a similar restoration project is underway.

But he says this currently isn’t realistic in the Chesapeake. So far, their efforts have failed because of oyster-killing parasites in the water and algal blooms caused by farm runoff. Oysters can be part of a water filtration plan, he says, but reducing the inputs from agricultural runoff and sewage treatment plants is an equally important factor in restoring ecosystems.

“Their idea of oyster restoration in the Chesapeake is just to take oysters by the millions and dump them in the water, but the reason that they died was due to infections. If you’re going to take the oysters and put them back in the same water where they died from an infection, that’s a top-down solution to a bottom-up problem,” says Cervino, co-founder of the Electric Oyster Project.

According to Katie Mosher-Smith, New York coordinator for the Baykeeper’s restoration project, untreated sewage, the stuff responsible for creating low oxygen levels, is still flowing into New York’s water. This is because New York has a so-called combined sewer system, which means that when it rains, the human-waste sewer provides back up for the storm sewers that dump out into the ocean. “Every time there is more than a quarter inch of rain, the sewers drain out into New York Harbor,” says Mosher-Smith.

In addition, Bushek says that the water conditions in New York Harbor have not just changed from sewage runoff but also from water entering the area from upstate via the Hudson River. There is now much more nitrogen fertilizer coming down the Hudson from upstream sources, like farm runoff, than when oysters were plentiful. “It’s unclear how [the oysters] will be restored because the whole system has changed,” says Bushek. However, despite these challenges to water quality, Bushek remains positive that oysters can and should be restored.

Ironically, another major challenge to repopulating oysters is that once their numbers begin to rise, people might start eating them illegally. This would be unwise because, in addition to a risk of bacterial infection, New York shellfish are known to be contaminated with harmful industrial pollutants like lead and polychlorinated biphenyls, commonly known as PCBs, that accumulate in their tissues. Suffice it to say, eating any restored oysters would pose a serious health hazard. This concern has caused the New York City Health Department to discourage the restoration of oyster reefs. Bushek says that enforcement of laws prohibiting oyster harvests for human consumption would have to be part of any restoration plan.