The Importance of Restoring New York Harbor with Oysters

On top of combating the effects of human waste in New York Harbor, there's also the issue of 200 years of commercial runoff to contend with. The oysters can't compete with this combined sewer overflowing into the harbor, but by building a constituency for the harbor, people are starting to realize that there is an important ecosystem here that needs to be restored. This is the real impact of the oyster project, not just the filtering capabilities of the oysters themselves.

Restoring New York Harbor requires more than just a technological solution - it requires a cultural shift in how we think about our relationship with the harbor and its inhabitants. As one person put it, "it doesn't seem like a much nicer place to live too...like if this was beautiful, if I could bring my kid here, catch a fish or go crabbing, you know, like or go swimming." The idea of a restored harbor is not just about aesthetics, but about creating a healthy and thriving ecosystem that can support all sorts of marine life.

The Billion Oyster Project: A Public-Private Partnership

The Billion Oyster Project was originally conceived as an aquatic analog to the Million Trees NYC initiative. The goal was to create a large-scale public-private partnership to restore New York Harbor, with a focus on oysters as a key component of this ecosystem. According to the project's leader, "a billion oysters would filter the standing volume of the upper bay...once every three days." This ambitious goal is aimed at creating a healthier and more sustainable harbor.

So far, the project has resulted in the harvesting of over 45 million oysters, which may seem like a small number compared to the ultimate goal of one billion. However, the project's leader remains optimistic that they will eventually reach their target. The organization has also recently established a new facility capable of producing 100 million oysters per year, which is expected to be in operation by next spring.

The Power of Community Involvement

Restoring New York Harbor is not just about technological solutions or large-scale infrastructure projects - it's also about building a community of people who care about the harbor and its inhabitants. As one person put it, "it takes a city to rebuild a harbor...you can't just ignore it and use it as a system of waste conveyance." By involving local residents, businesses, and restaurants in the project, the Billion Oyster Project is creating a sense of ownership and responsibility among these stakeholders.

The Importance of Community Involvement

The Billion Oyster Project's success depends on its ability to engage with the local community and involve them in the restoration process. As one person put it, "if we just continue to treat these waters and this earth as a dumping ground...we're done man." By bringing people together around the idea of restoring New York Harbor, the project is creating a sense of purpose and motivation among its supporters.

The Role of Kids in Saving the Harbor

One way that the Billion Oyster Project is engaging with the local community is by involving kids in the restoration process. As one person put it, "kids are getting involved...the restaurants are getting involved...the community is getting involved." This approach not only educates young people about the importance of marine conservation but also empowers them to take action and make a difference.

The Future of New York Harbor

As the Billion Oyster Project continues to grow and evolve, it's clear that restoring New York Harbor will be a long-term process. However, with the support of local residents, businesses, and organizations like the project itself, there is hope for a brighter future for this iconic urban waterway. As one person put it, "you know what we're getting pretty close...but we have to start now." By working together to restore New York Harbor, we can create a healthier, more sustainable ecosystem that benefits both people and wildlife.

The Importance of Oysters in the Ecosystem

Oysters are not just a food source or a decorative element - they play a critical role in maintaining the health of New York Harbor. As one person put it, "oysters have always been such an amazing food source...and being able to use this platform to showcase their importance as a tool in this ecosystem is so important." The Billion Oyster Project's focus on oysters is not just about aesthetics or culinary appeal but about recognizing the critical role that these marine animals play in maintaining the balance of the harbor's ecosystem.

Captain Pete's Oyster-Handling Skills

According to one person, Captain Pete "has upper management written all over them" - a testament to his leadership skills and dedication to the project. As for his own role on the project, Captain Pete prefers to focus on driving boats for film crews rather than taking on executive-level responsibilities. However, his enthusiasm and commitment to the cause are undeniable.

In conclusion, restoring New York Harbor is a complex and multifaceted process that requires the support of local residents, businesses, and organizations like the Billion Oyster Project. By engaging with the community, involving kids in the restoration process, and recognizing the critical role that oysters play in the harbor's ecosystem, we can create a healthier, more sustainable future for this iconic urban waterway.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: engood day in the office kevo yeah hey guys dan it's live we're out here in the new york harbor and we're teaming up with the folks from the billion oyster project out on governors island and we're gonna be learning how oysters are used not as a food but as a tool to reintroduce structure habitat and also clean the waters around the city so we're gonna go meet up with them and plant some oysters and plant some oysters you might want to double check that knot me all right pete so you know we're in governor's island which is this beautiful little time capsule of new york city you know which leads me to my question you know where where are you getting all these oyster shells all the shells you see here were collected from restaurants in new york city so we operate a shell collection program with about 80 partner restaurants and they cure for a year out of the water at that point i mean you can see the sun and the weather sort of desiccates the shells and kills any living organisms on them so that we don't have to worry about introducing anything and then we put them in tanks with oyster larvae and then they'll go from there out onto barges onto the bottom as an oyster reef so we're just mimicking that natural reef that used to be here right under the surface there used to be this whole landscape that's not there anymore so the whole world the whole world and it took about a hundred years once europeans arrived in new york city to harvest all the wild oysters so oysters in new york harbor filter the water stabilize the bottom provide food and habitat for hundreds of other species and can play a role in protecting the shores from storms so you guys are trying to bring that back to these waters which used to be fertile with it our mission is to do all that work through public education initiatives you know we're developing curricula for middle schools we're doing teacher training programs and those students actually collect data that helps inform our restoration work well how can i help you uh build a reef or how can i put me to work today so the our project for today is we're gonna fill some bags with shell and so we have some coconut fiber bags here that we're going to try out see they hold up as well as the plastic bags and then we'll try them for an installation doing in jamaica bay a little side by side a little experimental project here check this out damn how long did it take you guys to figure that one out someone was still holding the bag for a while we're not the only people doing this and so there's some best practices that we followed you know one bag at a time bud in a normal year you know we'll have volunteer days three days a week so normally it's more than just two people doing this work yeah nailed it you mentioned these were made out of out of coconut husk you know ultimately the goal is to have a sustaining reef that grows and builds on itself and so the question is do the coconut fiber bags last long enough to allow the reef to kind of transition into having its own structure i think that's the beautiful part of these right where it does its job breaks down yeah and then you just have a thriving natural oyster bed all of our projects are research projects and so we're trying to learn the best way to restore oysters so we have a number of different techniques and we have these gabiens which are larger steel structures and those are bigger heavier they won't move around i'm assuming that's what these are yeah and so you can see a lot of our process here too because they change year to year students at the harbor school ocean engineering program do some design work and then students of the welding program put them together and then these are all built by volunteers everyone's learning practicing uh a trade while restoring the the waters we could be using cement to build reef structures but we're not because there's a market in new york city for welders so we design our reef structures to leverage those skills oh man that's a beautiful thing you got going on pete get the lavender it's so pretty it smells so good too all right pete so we're down here at the pier here at your dock over by your facility uh what do you guys do here we call this our eco dock and it's a multi-use floating dock and uh when we moved this in and filled it with oysters it became the you know largest population of oysters in new york harbor in 100 years wow and it's interesting if you scuba dive here in the cove and swim towards the oysters you can watch the water get clearer and clearer the closer you get to the oysters hanging into the dock from this giant filtration system you guys installed exactly under all these grates or oysters and we can actually pick up one of the trays all right cool you just want to grab it like i am just grab the little bars because it's pretty good at pinching fingers and just sit down right here and this is pretty typical right all the trash every time it rains in new york all the trash gets pushed off the street into the water let's push the garbage by may here i'll clean this i'm just gonna pull him up huh so how old are these oysters if you had just a couple months so these are the shells that you had curing in the in that lot that we are in and then this is what grows on them little oysters little oysters and in a year the shell will look like a ball you won't be able to see the post shell anymore you know they haven't been in the water that long right but every square into the tray is covered in living things this is a species of tunicate a golden star tunicate and there's these sea grapes right yeah you're creating a structure right and that's the foundation for for life yeah the trees in the forest because like what without this structure on the bottom what's down there it's just it's just flat and featureless so there's nowhere to hide nothing to eat but then you put an oyster reef down and come back just in a couple weeks and that same spot there will be thousands of uh mud snails little mud crabs green crabs blue crabs sometimes horseshoe crabs that's amazing so how many you got down there in this on this dock this system can hold about half a million big oysters and you know many times that very small oysters wow it's amazing one way we work with schools is to provide them with one of these cages at a site near their school and then there's a whole sixth or eighth grade science curriculum that goes along with it i'm fine and i mean there's all types of little critters on here found a little snail so this is actually an oyster drill oyster drill yep they drill holes in the top of the shell and then melt the meat with sulfuric acid and suck out the juice good god like a horror movie and then they suck out the liquid oysters yeah it's delicious so it's a lot like what we looked at down on the dock you still have the same thing you have one shell that was collected from a restaurant and whatever this is ten oysters that are grown on you can start to see wow you get the three-dimensional habitat and now if you were a little bait fish i mean like who i almost who wouldn't want to go hide in there you know like that's it looks like a reef like it looks like coral reef right and what's this growth on here some type of that's called a golden star tunicate surprisingly it's a chordate so it's actually more closely related to you than the oyster is really but when you when they're in the water they puff up and they suck water through yeah look at that can you see that can you get in on that thing that's wild oh crab get him that little guy mud crab he was just hanging out in there i mean this is kind of a perfect example of reintroducing life back into the water that's a goal and so we have several hundred of these at 50 sites all over new york city oh really so you can imagine if you're a you know 11 year old kid who's like never thought about there being life in new york harbor pulling one of those up for the first time and seeing the crabs and shrimp and fish oh my god i mean i have a little kid two little kids and they would go nuts pulling up stuff like that well i think we can get uh go check out some some oysters that you might have out in the new york city water yeah let's get on the boat cool such a cool way to see the city well then you realize look at how vulnerable the city is to the water barely out of the water soccer ball someone's garbage i have so many soccer balls really yeah is that another one i think so right i'll get it right for the kids you know great job cleaning the waters you know one oyster one soccer ball at a time but we have an oyster nursery back up in here but this this is a combined sewer overflow pipe so there's 430 all around the city that overflow rain water and untreated household wastewater out into the harbor every time it rains so that pipe alone averages 660 million gallons of untreated household wastewater every year in the summer it gets real weird in here like these like bizarre colors and just like bacteria and other stuff growing it's pretty gross see how weird the water looks yeah it does have a chalkiness and this is like very mild chalky water it gets like looks like a milkshake it's disgusting we first put this oyster nursery in here to see whether or not the oysters could survive sure so the oysters in the nursery here not only survive but their offspring our offspring from other oysters are attaching to these to these bulkheads here oh amazing work you see right there is a bunch yeah if you can see there's little little like oysters that there's a bunch of them yeah there's a ton of them so the larvae spread out just like what you guys do back at your facility yep and they look and they find this wall and that's what they anchored onto right beautiful the navy yard had done a study and determined this uh barge basin to be sort of lifeless so we were allowed to put the nursery in here and what happened is they've created this whole ecosystem in here yeah notice you got some buoys set up and uh you know what do you got going on over here what are we doing it's different from a reef site because the oysters are growing off the bottom because of the low dissolved oxygen the oysters won't survive on the bottom i tell you what though pretty decent clarity that's what they do they're removing particles from the water and helping to clarify the water and we pull them out in august and september every tray has a blue crab that's big in it and there's blackfish and shrimp just like flying out of the cages this was probably extremely fertile like waters fishing grounds there was probably crabs and lobsters fish everywhere this used to be a wall about creek which went right up into clinton hills so this would have been all shallows and salt marsh totally full of animals you know i can close my eyes and we can picture how it once was and then you open your eyes and we're in the middle of new york city there's shipping containers i mean what we're in the navy brooklyn navy yards right so on top of when it rains there's all this human waste now those were also you're also combating 200 years of commercial runoff right the oysters can't compete with the combined sewer overflowing into into the harbor but the more people who realize that there actually is this important ecosystem here that we can restore right that's the real impact the oysters are going to have on the water it's building a constituency for the harbor you know of people who are don't think it's acceptable to pour raw sewage into your you know on your resource it takes a city to rebuild a harbor right you know that that's that should be on your guys's on your t-shirt man because that's there's no more truth to it than that more people who know about it the more people who care and help out the better chance we have of being successful and i mean not only do we need to because we have to but i mean doesn't it seem like a much nicer place to live too like if this was beautiful if i could bring my kid here catch a fish or go crabbing you know like or go swimming that sounds amazing you know i've seen pods of dolphins in new york harbor i've seen giant flocks of gannett um you know huge schools of men hating the whale um seals all that stuff still exists in the harbor if we just give it a little bit of a chance and like help it out a little bit it wants to come back and it will come back but you can't just you know ignore it and use it as a system of waste conveyance you know it's never gonna look like it did 400 years ago right that type of abundance doesn't exist anywhere on earth anymore because it's been removed by people but but we can get new york harbor back to a co-existing to coexisting to a place where you're going over the you know manhattan bridge on the train and you look out and you see you know a giant flock of turns eating bait fish that's not that's not out of the question right that just takes a little bit of yeah just needs a little help well let's uh let's go let's go tool around the city a bit yeah let's go check out the waters oh you got to get the guy waving dude sorry guys so cara um we lost kevin all right people you know before we go i have to ask you know it sounds i'd like to know i'd like to believe i could maybe guess it but like why building an oyster project where'd you come up with the name so originally we created billion oyster project as billion oysters nyc as the aquatic analog of million trees nyc to you know have a big public private partnership to restore new york harbor but a billion oysters a billion live oysters would filter the standing volume of the upper bay would process that that volume once every three days so that sounds nice oh wow a billion oysters would that's what it would take how many have you guys done uh about 45 million oh wow no kidding we have only 955 million to go job security do you think you'll hit it one day i think we'll definitely get there we have a new facility that can produce 100 million oysters a year that we put into into play last oh wow this past spring but it's not supposed to be easy you know so the the idea of a billion oysters it's supposed to be hard it's supposed to be ambitious it's supposed to be standing tall outstanding target and it's going to take everybody working together to make that happen i love it well good man i hope to contribute and i ain't kidding i want to come down with the kids and fill some bags one day when you guys are running volunteers sounds great see you on governor's island huge thanks to billy oyster project pete and everyone for bringing us out you know for me oysters have always been such an amazing food source and being able to use this platform to showcase the importance of them as a tool in this ecosystem is so important if we just continue to treat these waters and this earth as as a dumping ground as a wasting ground we're done man and you know what we're getting pretty close so uh you know i do believe there's plenty of time left but uh we have to start now and kids are getting involved people are getting involved the restaurants are getting involved the community is getting involved it takes a city to rebuild the harbor so hope you guys learned something i certainly did thanks to the billion oyster project for all the work they do and we'll see you guys next time bon appetit there's one thing they say about captain pete he's got upper management written all over them you know one day you might be executive director with this attitude i'd rather just drive boats for film crews yougood day in the office kevo yeah hey guys dan it's live we're out here in the new york harbor and we're teaming up with the folks from the billion oyster project out on governors island and we're gonna be learning how oysters are used not as a food but as a tool to reintroduce structure habitat and also clean the waters around the city so we're gonna go meet up with them and plant some oysters and plant some oysters you might want to double check that knot me all right pete so you know we're in governor's island which is this beautiful little time capsule of new york city you know which leads me to my question you know where where are you getting all these oyster shells all the shells you see here were collected from restaurants in new york city so we operate a shell collection program with about 80 partner restaurants and they cure for a year out of the water at that point i mean you can see the sun and the weather sort of desiccates the shells and kills any living organisms on them so that we don't have to worry about introducing anything and then we put them in tanks with oyster larvae and then they'll go from there out onto barges onto the bottom as an oyster reef so we're just mimicking that natural reef that used to be here right under the surface there used to be this whole landscape that's not there anymore so the whole world the whole world and it took about a hundred years once europeans arrived in new york city to harvest all the wild oysters so oysters in new york harbor filter the water stabilize the bottom provide food and habitat for hundreds of other species and can play a role in protecting the shores from storms so you guys are trying to bring that back to these waters which used to be fertile with it our mission is to do all that work through public education initiatives you know we're developing curricula for middle schools we're doing teacher training programs and those students actually collect data that helps inform our restoration work well how can i help you uh build a reef or how can i put me to work today so the our project for today is we're gonna fill some bags with shell and so we have some coconut fiber bags here that we're going to try out see they hold up as well as the plastic bags and then we'll try them for an installation doing in jamaica bay a little side by side a little experimental project here check this out damn how long did it take you guys to figure that one out someone was still holding the bag for a while we're not the only people doing this and so there's some best practices that we followed you know one bag at a time bud in a normal year you know we'll have volunteer days three days a week so normally it's more than just two people doing this work yeah nailed it you mentioned these were made out of out of coconut husk you know ultimately the goal is to have a sustaining reef that grows and builds on itself and so the question is do the coconut fiber bags last long enough to allow the reef to kind of transition into having its own structure i think that's the beautiful part of these right where it does its job breaks down yeah and then you just have a thriving natural oyster bed all of our projects are research projects and so we're trying to learn the best way to restore oysters so we have a number of different techniques and we have these gabiens which are larger steel structures and those are bigger heavier they won't move around i'm assuming that's what these are yeah and so you can see a lot of our process here too because they change year to year students at the harbor school ocean engineering program do some design work and then students of the welding program put them together and then these are all built by volunteers everyone's learning practicing uh a trade while restoring the the waters we could be using cement to build reef structures but we're not because there's a market in new york city for welders so we design our reef structures to leverage those skills oh man that's a beautiful thing you got going on pete get the lavender it's so pretty it smells so good too all right pete so we're down here at the pier here at your dock over by your facility uh what do you guys do here we call this our eco dock and it's a multi-use floating dock and uh when we moved this in and filled it with oysters it became the you know largest population of oysters in new york harbor in 100 years wow and it's interesting if you scuba dive here in the cove and swim towards the oysters you can watch the water get clearer and clearer the closer you get to the oysters hanging into the dock from this giant filtration system you guys installed exactly under all these grates or oysters and we can actually pick up one of the trays all right cool you just want to grab it like i am just grab the little bars because it's pretty good at pinching fingers and just sit down right here and this is pretty typical right all the trash every time it rains in new york all the trash gets pushed off the street into the water let's push the garbage by may here i'll clean this i'm just gonna pull him up huh so how old are these oysters if you had just a couple months so these are the shells that you had curing in the in that lot that we are in and then this is what grows on them little oysters little oysters and in a year the shell will look like a ball you won't be able to see the post shell anymore you know they haven't been in the water that long right but every square into the tray is covered in living things this is a species of tunicate a golden star tunicate and there's these sea grapes right yeah you're creating a structure right and that's the foundation for for life yeah the trees in the forest because like what without this structure on the bottom what's down there it's just it's just flat and featureless so there's nowhere to hide nothing to eat but then you put an oyster reef down and come back just in a couple weeks and that same spot there will be thousands of uh mud snails little mud crabs green crabs blue crabs sometimes horseshoe crabs that's amazing so how many you got down there in this on this dock this system can hold about half a million big oysters and you know many times that very small oysters wow it's amazing one way we work with schools is to provide them with one of these cages at a site near their school and then there's a whole sixth or eighth grade science curriculum that goes along with it i'm fine and i mean there's all types of little critters on here found a little snail so this is actually an oyster drill oyster drill yep they drill holes in the top of the shell and then melt the meat with sulfuric acid and suck out the juice good god like a horror movie and then they suck out the liquid oysters yeah it's delicious so it's a lot like what we looked at down on the dock you still have the same thing you have one shell that was collected from a restaurant and whatever this is ten oysters that are grown on you can start to see wow you get the three-dimensional habitat and now if you were a little bait fish i mean like who i almost who wouldn't want to go hide in there you know like that's it looks like a reef like it looks like coral reef right and what's this growth on here some type of that's called a golden star tunicate surprisingly it's a chordate so it's actually more closely related to you than the oyster is really but when you when they're in the water they puff up and they suck water through yeah look at that can you see that can you get in on that thing that's wild oh crab get him that little guy mud crab he was just hanging out in there i mean this is kind of a perfect example of reintroducing life back into the water that's a goal and so we have several hundred of these at 50 sites all over new york city oh really so you can imagine if you're a you know 11 year old kid who's like never thought about there being life in new york harbor pulling one of those up for the first time and seeing the crabs and shrimp and fish oh my god i mean i have a little kid two little kids and they would go nuts pulling up stuff like that well i think we can get uh go check out some some oysters that you might have out in the new york city water yeah let's get on the boat cool such a cool way to see the city well then you realize look at how vulnerable the city is to the water barely out of the water soccer ball someone's garbage i have so many soccer balls really yeah is that another one i think so right i'll get it right for the kids you know great job cleaning the waters you know one oyster one soccer ball at a time but we have an oyster nursery back up in here but this this is a combined sewer overflow pipe so there's 430 all around the city that overflow rain water and untreated household wastewater out into the harbor every time it rains so that pipe alone averages 660 million gallons of untreated household wastewater every year in the summer it gets real weird in here like these like bizarre colors and just like bacteria and other stuff growing it's pretty gross see how weird the water looks yeah it does have a chalkiness and this is like very mild chalky water it gets like looks like a milkshake it's disgusting we first put this oyster nursery in here to see whether or not the oysters could survive sure so the oysters in the nursery here not only survive but their offspring our offspring from other oysters are attaching to these to these bulkheads here oh amazing work you see right there is a bunch yeah if you can see there's little little like oysters that there's a bunch of them yeah there's a ton of them so the larvae spread out just like what you guys do back at your facility yep and they look and they find this wall and that's what they anchored onto right beautiful the navy yard had done a study and determined this uh barge basin to be sort of lifeless so we were allowed to put the nursery in here and what happened is they've created this whole ecosystem in here yeah notice you got some buoys set up and uh you know what do you got going on over here what are we doing it's different from a reef site because the oysters are growing off the bottom because of the low dissolved oxygen the oysters won't survive on the bottom i tell you what though pretty decent clarity that's what they do they're removing particles from the water and helping to clarify the water and we pull them out in august and september every tray has a blue crab that's big in it and there's blackfish and shrimp just like flying out of the cages this was probably extremely fertile like waters fishing grounds there was probably crabs and lobsters fish everywhere this used to be a wall about creek which went right up into clinton hills so this would have been all shallows and salt marsh totally full of animals you know i can close my eyes and we can picture how it once was and then you open your eyes and we're in the middle of new york city there's shipping containers i mean what we're in the navy brooklyn navy yards right so on top of when it rains there's all this human waste now those were also you're also combating 200 years of commercial runoff right the oysters can't compete with the combined sewer overflowing into into the harbor but the more people who realize that there actually is this important ecosystem here that we can restore right that's the real impact the oysters are going to have on the water it's building a constituency for the harbor you know of people who are don't think it's acceptable to pour raw sewage into your you know on your resource it takes a city to rebuild a harbor right you know that that's that should be on your guys's on your t-shirt man because that's there's no more truth to it than that more people who know about it the more people who care and help out the better chance we have of being successful and i mean not only do we need to because we have to but i mean doesn't it seem like a much nicer place to live too like if this was beautiful if i could bring my kid here catch a fish or go crabbing you know like or go swimming that sounds amazing you know i've seen pods of dolphins in new york harbor i've seen giant flocks of gannett um you know huge schools of men hating the whale um seals all that stuff still exists in the harbor if we just give it a little bit of a chance and like help it out a little bit it wants to come back and it will come back but you can't just you know ignore it and use it as a system of waste conveyance you know it's never gonna look like it did 400 years ago right that type of abundance doesn't exist anywhere on earth anymore because it's been removed by people but but we can get new york harbor back to a co-existing to coexisting to a place where you're going over the you know manhattan bridge on the train and you look out and you see you know a giant flock of turns eating bait fish that's not that's not out of the question right that just takes a little bit of yeah just needs a little help well let's uh let's go let's go tool around the city a bit yeah let's go check out the waters oh you got to get the guy waving dude sorry guys so cara um we lost kevin all right people you know before we go i have to ask you know it sounds i'd like to know i'd like to believe i could maybe guess it but like why building an oyster project where'd you come up with the name so originally we created billion oyster project as billion oysters nyc as the aquatic analog of million trees nyc to you know have a big public private partnership to restore new york harbor but a billion oysters a billion live oysters would filter the standing volume of the upper bay would process that that volume once every three days so that sounds nice oh wow a billion oysters would that's what it would take how many have you guys done uh about 45 million oh wow no kidding we have only 955 million to go job security do you think you'll hit it one day i think we'll definitely get there we have a new facility that can produce 100 million oysters a year that we put into into play last oh wow this past spring but it's not supposed to be easy you know so the the idea of a billion oysters it's supposed to be hard it's supposed to be ambitious it's supposed to be standing tall outstanding target and it's going to take everybody working together to make that happen i love it well good man i hope to contribute and i ain't kidding i want to come down with the kids and fill some bags one day when you guys are running volunteers sounds great see you on governor's island huge thanks to billy oyster project pete and everyone for bringing us out you know for me oysters have always been such an amazing food source and being able to use this platform to showcase the importance of them as a tool in this ecosystem is so important if we just continue to treat these waters and this earth as as a dumping ground as a wasting ground we're done man and you know what we're getting pretty close so uh you know i do believe there's plenty of time left but uh we have to start now and kids are getting involved people are getting involved the restaurants are getting involved the community is getting involved it takes a city to rebuild the harbor so hope you guys learned something i certainly did thanks to the billion oyster project for all the work they do and we'll see you guys next time bon appetit there's one thing they say about captain pete he's got upper management written all over them you know one day you might be executive director with this attitude i'd rather just drive boats for film crews yougood day in the office kevo yeah hey guys dan it's live we're out here in the new york harbor and we're teaming up with the folks from the billion oyster project out on governors island and we're gonna be learning how oysters are used not as a food but as a tool to reintroduce structure habitat and also clean the waters around the city so we're gonna go meet up with them and plant some oysters and plant some oysters you might want to double check that knot me all right pete so you know we're in governor's island which is this beautiful little time capsule of new york city you know which leads me to my question you know where where are you getting all these oyster shells all the shells you see here were collected from restaurants in new york city so we operate a shell collection program with about 80 partner restaurants and they cure for a year out of the water at that point i mean you can see the sun and the weather sort of desiccates the shells and kills any living organisms on them so that we don't have to worry about introducing anything and then we put them in tanks with oyster larvae and then they'll go from there out onto barges onto the bottom as an oyster reef so we're just mimicking that natural reef that used to be here right under the surface there used to be this whole landscape that's not there anymore so the whole world the whole world and it took about a hundred years once europeans arrived in new york city to harvest all the wild oysters so oysters in new york harbor filter the water stabilize the bottom provide food and habitat for hundreds of other species and can play a role in protecting the shores from storms so you guys are trying to bring that back to these waters which used to be fertile with it our mission is to do all that work through public education initiatives you know we're developing curricula for middle schools we're doing teacher training programs and those students actually collect data that helps inform our restoration work well how can i help you uh build a reef or how can i put me to work today so the our project for today is we're gonna fill some bags with shell and so we have some coconut fiber bags here that we're going to try out see they hold up as well as the plastic bags and then we'll try them for an installation doing in jamaica bay a little side by side a little experimental project here check this out damn how long did it take you guys to figure that one out someone was still holding the bag for a while we're not the only people doing this and so there's some best practices that we followed you know one bag at a time bud in a normal year you know we'll have volunteer days three days a week so normally it's more than just two people doing this work yeah nailed it you mentioned these were made out of out of coconut husk you know ultimately the goal is to have a sustaining reef that grows and builds on itself and so the question is do the coconut fiber bags last long enough to allow the reef to kind of transition into having its own structure i think that's the beautiful part of these right where it does its job breaks down yeah and then you just have a thriving natural oyster bed all of our projects are research projects and so we're trying to learn the best way to restore oysters so we have a number of different techniques and we have these gabiens which are larger steel structures and those are bigger heavier they won't move around i'm assuming that's what these are yeah and so you can see a lot of our process here too because they change year to year students at the harbor school ocean engineering program do some design work and then students of the welding program put them together and then these are all built by volunteers everyone's learning practicing uh a trade while restoring the the waters we could be using cement to build reef structures but we're not because there's a market in new york city for welders so we design our reef structures to leverage those skills oh man that's a beautiful thing you got going on pete get the lavender it's so pretty it smells so good too all right pete so we're down here at the pier here at your dock over by your facility uh what do you guys do here we call this our eco dock and it's a multi-use floating dock and uh when we moved this in and filled it with oysters it became the you know largest population of oysters in new york harbor in 100 years wow and it's interesting if you scuba dive here in the cove and swim towards the oysters you can watch the water get clearer and clearer the closer you get to the oysters hanging into the dock from this giant filtration system you guys installed exactly under all these grates or oysters and we can actually pick up one of the trays all right cool you just want to grab it like i am just grab the little bars because it's pretty good at pinching fingers and just sit down right here and this is pretty typical right all the trash every time it rains in new york all the trash gets pushed off the street into the water let's push the garbage by may here i'll clean this i'm just gonna pull him up huh so how old are these oysters if you had just a couple months so these are the shells that you had curing in the in that lot that we are in and then this is what grows on them little oysters little oysters and in a year the shell will look like a ball you won't be able to see the post shell anymore you know they haven't been in the water that long right but every square into the tray is covered in living things this is a species of tunicate a golden star tunicate and there's these sea grapes right yeah you're creating a structure right and that's the foundation for for life yeah the trees in the forest because like what without this structure on the bottom what's down there it's just it's just flat and featureless so there's nowhere to hide nothing to eat but then you put an oyster reef down and come back just in a couple weeks and that same spot there will be thousands of uh mud snails little mud crabs green crabs blue crabs sometimes horseshoe crabs that's amazing so how many you got down there in this on this dock this system can hold about half a million big oysters and you know many times that very small oysters wow it's amazing one way we work with schools is to provide them with one of these cages at a site near their school and then there's a whole sixth or eighth grade science curriculum that goes along with it i'm fine and i mean there's all types of little critters on here found a little snail so this is actually an oyster drill oyster drill yep they drill holes in the top of the shell and then melt the meat with sulfuric acid and suck out the juice good god like a horror movie and then they suck out the liquid oysters yeah it's delicious so it's a lot like what we looked at down on the dock you still have the same thing you have one shell that was collected from a restaurant and whatever this is ten oysters that are grown on you can start to see wow you get the three-dimensional habitat and now if you were a little bait fish i mean like who i almost who wouldn't want to go hide in there you know like that's it looks like a reef like it looks like coral reef right and what's this growth on here some type of that's called a golden star tunicate surprisingly it's a chordate so it's actually more closely related to you than the oyster is really but when you when they're in the water they puff up and they suck water through yeah look at that can you see that can you get in on that thing that's wild oh crab get him that little guy mud crab he was just hanging out in there i mean this is kind of a perfect example of reintroducing life back into the water that's a goal and so we have several hundred of these at 50 sites all over new york city oh really so you can imagine if you're a you know 11 year old kid who's like never thought about there being life in new york harbor pulling one of those up for the first time and seeing the crabs and shrimp and fish oh my god i mean i have a little kid two little kids and they would go nuts pulling up stuff like that well i think we can get uh go check out some some oysters that you might have out in the new york city water yeah let's get on the boat cool such a cool way to see the city well then you realize look at how vulnerable the city is to the water barely out of the water soccer ball someone's garbage i have so many soccer balls really yeah is that another one i think so right i'll get it right for the kids you know great job cleaning the waters you know one oyster one soccer ball at a time but we have an oyster nursery back up in here but this this is a combined sewer overflow pipe so there's 430 all around the city that overflow rain water and untreated household wastewater out into the harbor every time it rains so that pipe alone averages 660 million gallons of untreated household wastewater every year in the summer it gets real weird in here like these like bizarre colors and just like bacteria and other stuff growing it's pretty gross see how weird the water looks yeah it does have a chalkiness and this is like very mild chalky water it gets like looks like a milkshake it's disgusting we first put this oyster nursery in here to see whether or not the oysters could survive sure so the oysters in the nursery here not only survive but their offspring our offspring from other oysters are attaching to these to these bulkheads here oh amazing work you see right there is a bunch yeah if you can see there's little little like oysters that there's a bunch of them yeah there's a ton of them so the larvae spread out just like what you guys do back at your facility yep and they look and they find this wall and that's what they anchored onto right beautiful the navy yard had done a study and determined this uh barge basin to be sort of lifeless so we were allowed to put the nursery in here and what happened is they've created this whole ecosystem in here yeah notice you got some buoys set up and uh you know what do you got going on over here what are we doing it's different from a reef site because the oysters are growing off the bottom because of the low dissolved oxygen the oysters won't survive on the bottom i tell you what though pretty decent clarity that's what they do they're removing particles from the water and helping to clarify the water and we pull them out in august and september every tray has a blue crab that's big in it and there's blackfish and shrimp just like flying out of the cages this was probably extremely fertile like waters fishing grounds there was probably crabs and lobsters fish everywhere this used to be a wall about creek which went right up into clinton hills so this would have been all shallows and salt marsh totally full of animals you know i can close my eyes and we can picture how it once was and then you open your eyes and we're in the middle of new york city there's shipping containers i mean what we're in the navy brooklyn navy yards right so on top of when it rains there's all this human waste now those were also you're also combating 200 years of commercial runoff right the oysters can't compete with the combined sewer overflowing into into the harbor but the more people who realize that there actually is this important ecosystem here that we can restore right that's the real impact the oysters are going to have on the water it's building a constituency for the harbor you know of people who are don't think it's acceptable to pour raw sewage into your you know on your resource it takes a city to rebuild a harbor right you know that that's that should be on your guys's on your t-shirt man because that's there's no more truth to it than that more people who know about it the more people who care and help out the better chance we have of being successful and i mean not only do we need to because we have to but i mean doesn't it seem like a much nicer place to live too like if this was beautiful if i could bring my kid here catch a fish or go crabbing you know like or go swimming that sounds amazing you know i've seen pods of dolphins in new york harbor i've seen giant flocks of gannett um you know huge schools of men hating the whale um seals all that stuff still exists in the harbor if we just give it a little bit of a chance and like help it out a little bit it wants to come back and it will come back but you can't just you know ignore it and use it as a system of waste conveyance you know it's never gonna look like it did 400 years ago right that type of abundance doesn't exist anywhere on earth anymore because it's been removed by people but but we can get new york harbor back to a co-existing to coexisting to a place where you're going over the you know manhattan bridge on the train and you look out and you see you know a giant flock of turns eating bait fish that's not that's not out of the question right that just takes a little bit of yeah just needs a little help well let's uh let's go let's go tool around the city a bit yeah let's go check out the waters oh you got to get the guy waving dude sorry guys so cara um we lost kevin all right people you know before we go i have to ask you know it sounds i'd like to know i'd like to believe i could maybe guess it but like why building an oyster project where'd you come up with the name so originally we created billion oyster project as billion oysters nyc as the aquatic analog of million trees nyc to you know have a big public private partnership to restore new york harbor but a billion oysters a billion live oysters would filter the standing volume of the upper bay would process that that volume once every three days so that sounds nice oh wow a billion oysters would that's what it would take how many have you guys done uh about 45 million oh wow no kidding we have only 955 million to go job security do you think you'll hit it one day i think we'll definitely get there we have a new facility that can produce 100 million oysters a year that we put into into play last oh wow this past spring but it's not supposed to be easy you know so the the idea of a billion oysters it's supposed to be hard it's supposed to be ambitious it's supposed to be standing tall outstanding target and it's going to take everybody working together to make that happen i love it well good man i hope to contribute and i ain't kidding i want to come down with the kids and fill some bags one day when you guys are running volunteers sounds great see you on governor's island huge thanks to billy oyster project pete and everyone for bringing us out you know for me oysters have always been such an amazing food source and being able to use this platform to showcase the importance of them as a tool in this ecosystem is so important if we just continue to treat these waters and this earth as as a dumping ground as a wasting ground we're done man and you know what we're getting pretty close so uh you know i do believe there's plenty of time left but uh we have to start now and kids are getting involved people are getting involved the restaurants are getting involved the community is getting involved it takes a city to rebuild the harbor so hope you guys learned something i certainly did thanks to the billion oyster project for all the work they do and we'll see you guys next time bon appetit there's one thing they say about captain pete he's got upper management written all over them you know one day you might be executive director with this attitude i'd rather just drive boats for film crews you\n"