New York Oysters on WNYC

Here's an informative talk on the oyster reef restoration efforts in New York City on the Brian Lehrer Show featuring Mark Kurlansky, author of the Big Oyster, and Professor Jeffrey Levinton from Stonybrook University.

Possibly No Consumable Oysters in the Gowanus Canal.... Ever

The future of oysters in Gowanus Canal looked bright in light of Kate's TED talk, but this New York Times article finds otherwise. The Canal has been deemed a Superfund Site, which is a site designated to clean up unregulated wastes. The canal is polluted with more than a dozen contaminants, some of which are carcinogens. The flow of contaminants into the canal has decreased but still continues today. The city and the EPA are working jointly on remediation measures. The city is upgrading the canal's flushing tunnel and pump, which will decrease combined sewer overflows by 34% and will be completed in 2013. The canal is in for years of dredging, starting in 2015 and ending 10 years later. This means that it will be impossible to have any oysters in the near future. Maybe oysters can be grown for consumption in a less polluted New York City waterway?

Oyster-tecture on TED!

My Sustainable Futures professor, Kate Orff, is a TED celebrity! I love TED talks. One of my favorite activities is exploring their videos, which are talks given by experts in many different fields, from cartooning to architecture to ecology to music artists. After coming back from the architecture class on aquaponics that I'm sitting in on, coming across this video was a real treat. I already made a blog post concerning oyster-tecture so you can find more details there but Kate's project proposed to reintroduce oysters to NYC's waterways in order to reduce pollution, restore the ecosystem, and grow some tasty mollusks for human consumption (I'm not sure I want to eat oysters from the Gowanus Canal though...).

Oyster-tecture

This semester I'm taking a course taught by Kate Orff called Sustainable Futures. Half of the students are Sustainable Management Masters students and the other half are architecture students. The objective of the class is to look at how science and design can work together to create a more sustainable world in the face of problems such as changing climate and energy consumption. Last year Kate Orff gave a presentation on her work on a project she was working on for the Rising Currents exhibit featured at MoMa (Museum of Modern Art). The purpose of this exhibit was to imagine how New York City would react to the sea level rise from climate change. The exhibit was called oyster-tecture and proposes the reintroduction of oysters to the Gondwanas Canal, which used to be famous for the best oysters in NYC. New York City used to be . Creates calmer zones and the oysters filter the water. The oysters would be part of a regional park that have diving platforms and boardwalks and habitat for animals . Kate Orff explains oyster-tecture in more detail in this video:

Awesome Oyster-tecture Vocabulary:

Flupsy- floating upwelling system, a oyster nursery that is like a raft that protects the baby oysters from predators and provides adequate water flow

Fuzzy rope- the rope only 99 cents a yard that the spat grabs onto to provide a substrate for oyster attachment

Oyster-tecture- the structure that nets of fuzzy rope are attached to create an oyster farm

Although this project was just an idea, oyster farming in NYC has been making a comeback and never really left the Long Island area. Bluepoints are the oysters that were found off of the town of Blue Point on Long Island's Great South Bay. These oysters became so popular in the 1800s in New York City that they were soon eaten to extinction. More oyster beds were found in the Great South Bay and they were given the name. On every menu in NYC, there are Bluepoints because people feel like they are the best. However, according to the Oyster Guide, these oysters are not very tasty. Better oysters from New York are found in the Peconic Bay, Noyac Bay, and Gardiner's Bay. One of these is an oyster farm in Greenport, Long Island called Widow's Hole Oysters located in Peconic Bay one hundred miles from NYC. Here's a video showing the farm:

I have never been to an oyster bar in NYC. The only oysters I've had are fresh from the waters of South Africa where I watched them take the oysters out of the water and put them onto my plate and I ate them raw. Also I had them in New Hampshire, where a few weeks ago I tried New England style fried oysters. I would like to try oysters from the Long Island area but am a little concerned about eating oysters grown in NYC's waters because they are filter feeders and accumulate toxins. This project interested me because it also deals with architecture for marine life and with an organism that is considered an aphrodisiac like mamajuana. However, there have been no proven scientific studies that aphrodisiac foods actually provide that function. : )