Can students return a billion oysters to a New York harbor?

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CLARISSA LYNN: Does everyone have a pen or pencil?


IVETTE FELICIANO: 7th grade science teacher Clarissa Lynn
takes her class on a 15-minute walk from their school in Harlem
to New York City’s East River. There, they pull up a cage filled
with oysters from an an oyster restoration station.


CLARISSA LYNN: Put it in…


IVETTE FELICIANO: Observing the growth of oysters is part
of the Billion Oyster Project, an initiative to restore a billion
of the once plentiful oysters to New York’s harbor by 2035.


Clarissa Lynn’s Central Park East 2 is one of over 100
participating middle schools and high schools.


CLARISSA LYNN: The oysters are a perfect hands on vehicle
to teach kids a lot of different science skills. You can go into
lessons on classification, and identification, ecology roles, so
how do these organisms work together to create a balanced
ecosystem?


IVETTE FELICIANO: More than 10,000 students monitor and
collect data at 100 oyster restoration stations.


CLARISSA LYNN: You can identify what type of crab.


They’re learning so much about the world that they particularly
live in. We’re not studying a coral reef in some other part of
the world. No, this is your backyard.


IVETTE FELICIANO: Students document conditions, like water
quality and clarity, and write reports.


JANINE JIMENEZ, STUDENT: My question is how and why are
the oysters dying. Since there’s a lot of things going on. The
oysters haven’t been doing well today, like for the past few
months.


EJ JIMINEZ: We started with about 100 and then next thing
we know, a bunch of them died.
IVETTE FELICIANO: Twins Janine and Ej Jiminez are studying why 70
percent of the oysters have died at their station since last
October.


CLARISSA LYNN: That was the inspiration for their project
– why is this happening? Finding out that this is not a suitable
place to put an oyster reef is important, because that’ll help us
narrow down the places for the project to ultimately be
successful.


IVETTE FELICIANO: New York City was once known as the
oyster capital of the world, with 200,000 acres of oyster reefs.


MURRAY FISHER: There were more oysters consumed, produced,
and shipped out of New York Harbor in New York City than anywhere
else in the world. But by the early 1800s, we had eaten them all.


IVETTE FELICIANO: Billion Oyster Project co-founder Murray
Fisher considers oysters a keystone species that can help can
clean or filter the water by removing algae, phytoplankton, and
other particles.


MURRAY FISHER: An adult oyster filters, conservatively, in
the summertime when they’re feeding, a gallon of water an hour,
so 24 gallons a day. That means the standing volume of New York
Harbor would be filtered by a billion oysters once every three
days.


IVETTE FELICIANO: The oyster reefs not only filter the
water, they also provide habitat for other wildlife and help
protect erosion of the shoreline from future storms and flooding.


Since the project began three years ago, students have planted
over 24 million oysters in the harbor.


While these oysters are not destined for consumption, restaurants
across the city are participating, by providing millions of
recycled oyster shells to build back the reefs.


NAAMA TAMIR: We keep the top part of the oyster shelL.
When they’re done with the oysters, we make sure we keep the
bottom parts as well.


IVETTE FELICIANO: Naama Tamir hosts a daily oyster happy
hour at her restaurant, Lighthouse, in Brooklyn.


She donates 800 shells a week. The project then implants them
onto the shells and distributes them to the monitoring stations.


The project still has a long way to go before reaching a billion.


CLARISSA LYNN: My hope is that some of these students will
end up in career paths into sciences, technology and engineering.
They definitely have the ability, and I think a big part is
helping them see that they have the confidence or they have the
capability to do that.


MURRAY FISHER: This once was one of the most productive
ecosystems on the planet. If we want to live sustainably and
happily for another several hundred years or maybe every thousand
years, we’ve got to take care of this natural resource. And if we
don’t know about it, we’re not going to take care of it.


The post Can students return a billion oysters to a New York
harbor? appeared first on PBS NewsHour.