(up-tempo jazz playing)
(narrator) New York City—
one of the most densely packed urban areas in the world.
And perhaps one of the least likely to be the epicenter
of an ambitious, even audacious, restoration project.
The goal—to bring back oysters to the city’s harbor—
one billion of them.
(music begins)
(seagulls squawking)
These teens are part of the Billion Oyster Project.
It started in 2009 at one high school
and has expanded rapidly ever since.
(water burbling)
(Harold Beneveras) Each oyster can actually filter about 50 gallons of water per day.
(Melanie Longo) They’re a keystone species,
so if we do get a billion oysters out here,
the harbor will basically be able to filter itself out in three days.
(narrator) Thousands of students and volunteers
are working at dozens of different sites.
Already, they have planted more than 25 million oysters.
(music continues)
Oysters have deep evolutionary roots,
tracing their ancestry back to the Age of the Dinosaurs,
around 250 million years ago.
(birds chirping)
(paddles splashing in water)
Dr. Christine Brandon is piecing together the history of New York’s oysters
at a research site on Staten Island.
(Brandon) The technology we use is actually very low-tech.
We build a platform between two canoes,
go out into the middle of the pond,
(laughter)
(water sloshing)
sink a plastic barrel down into the sediment, and pull it up again.
(laughter)
In one of the cores, we had an entire oyster shell in there,
so we know that the oysters were present
going back to at least a few thousand years ago.
(narrator) The team focused on the connection between oysters
and hurricane damage.
They found storm deposits increased when the oysters disappeared.
(Brandon) When we looked, we saw a dramatic change in the sediment
that dated to around 400 years ago.
(music begins)
Four hundred years ago corresponds to the time that the Dutch colonists showed up,
and they went crazy for the oysters.
They loved eating them, they loved grinding up their shells
and using them as mortar for their houses and roads.
They basically took as many oysters as they could.
(Longo) In the 1900s,
there were oysters bigger than your head that people would just go out and fish.
They kept fishing them out and more pollutants
just kept getting dumped into the river more and more,
and they died off, and we went down to almost zero.
(wind whipping)
(siren blaring)
(narrator) Removing the oyster reefs has heightened
the damage from storms like Hurricane Sandy.
(wave crashing)
(Brandon) When a storm hits today, the effects can be devastating.
(narrator) These students saw the destruction first-hand.
(wave crashing)
(Longo) My basement got flooded.
(wave crashing)
(Beneveras) I had ten feet of water in my house.
(wave crashing)
(Justin Spinelli) We didn’t have electricity for over like a month.Ω
(water pouring)
(narrator) Bringing back the oyster reefs
can help protect against future storm damage.
(Brandon) Oysters have been around for a really long time,
and they’ve been building reefs just off shore for their entire existence.
Those reefs act as speed bumps that can stop storm waves
from hitting the coast.
(water burbling)
(narrator) Restoring key species like oysters to New York Harbor
has multiple ripple effects:
cleaning the water, protecting against storms,
and providing food.
And if restoration works here,
it can work anywhere.
(Longo) This project alone makes me want to do things worldwide
with other rivers and coral restoration
and that kind of thing when I’m older.
(music continues)
(water burbling)