The Return of New York Harbor’s Oysters | Hacker News Reader

The Return of New York Harbor’s Oysters

nautil.us

94 pointsdnetesn32 comments

Another nice idea is removing obsolete river dams to give fish access to their former breeding grounds upstream.

>The removal of both dams, in conjunction with active stocking of alewives into lakes and ponds upriver and in other parts of the watershed, has helped the river herring population rebound dramatically. The number of alewives returning to spawn jumped from 78,000 in 1999 to 5.5 million last year.

And the downstream estuary has reaped rewards, too.

When those billions of juvenile river herring leave the freshwater lakes and rivers, they head for the sea and may spend between three and five years in the marine environment. There they serve are a food source for everything from cod and haddock to whales and seals.

“They are really a kind of keystone ecological species for the Gulf of Maine,” says Burrows.

https://therevelator.org/edwards-dam-removal/

We need more dams. For "renewable" energy.

We're talking about dams that were built for a purpose that no longer exists, not the Hoover dam.

On the shores of Rhode Island, my family has participated in an oyster gardening program run URI which involved the same wire boxes and shells with larvae attached. However we kept them tied to the dock, then they collected and distributed to the beds. It's cool to see the research seems to have evolved and they can just go straight to the beds now.

That being said, all the little kids in my extended family got excited and educated about oysters from having them tied to the dock, so there's something to be said for that too.

There’s a nice Vox explainer for this: https://youtu.be/UcN6RXT7qpw.

The part that’s exciting for me is that these are variable (not static) barriers. I love solutions like these that intelligently use nature. eg in coastal areas in more tropical biomes, mangrove forests are a good flood control mechanism and their destruction has lead to excess flooding in a number of well documented cases (like Mumbai).

I wanted pictures of the oysters but instead I got pictures of a guy staring at my soul.

https://www.billionoysterproject.org/reefs

Here's Big

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/11/29/nyregion/00ny-oys...

I wonder what they look like underwater after they’ve had time to settle.

I bet he has the same stare.

This is a good recent article that has much more history of oysters in NYC, the causes of their demise as well as recent restoration efforts(including the Billion Oyster Project.)

https://untappedcities.com/2021/02/03/history-new-york-city-...

I'm not much for eating oysters, but these are the kind of leaders we really need. People with the will and means to inspire real, practical hope in our future.

These are the "first movers" who really matter, those with the vision and confidence to make positive changes in their community and surroundings. People with the hope and confidence to give us hope and confidence in our future.

So while I may not be much of an oyster eater, I commend Mr. Malinowski and his successful efforts to restore the waters of our precious land. From the harbors of New York City to every corner of this Earth, our land is worth saving. Our future is worth protecting and our people deserve hope.

Tell me why oysters are a keystone species.
Oysters are just like the trees in a forest. You don’t think of them that way, but it’s the same with coral reef systems—without the coral, there’s no coral reef. There’s no biodiversity. Oysters used to be the landscape of New York Harbor, which stretched over hundreds of thousands of acres in a three-dimensional habitat. They provided food for all these different animals. There are over 100 species of fish that historically either lived in, found their mates in, or laid their eggs in New York Harbor oyster reefs.

Fundamentally, all of our environmental problems are people problems, so if you ignore the people around the ecosystem and try to restore New York Harbor, it won’t have a lasting impact.

I like this guy's thinking.

I thought the part before your second excerpt was insightful as well.

> We’re trying to restore a billion oysters to New York Harbor and to engage a million people in that work by 2035. By setting these goals, we’re basically saying that we must stop thinking of habitat restoration and improving public education as two separate issues. The best way to improve outcomes for both is to combine them and train students to restore the environment. [...]

Environmental impact is all about scaling: either because your process is self-multiplying or because part of your process is training >1 people who will carry on and contribute to the work.

You can be the best, most productive oyster farmer in the world, but there's always going to be a cap to what you can do alone. Physical processes need physical muscle.

How do you solve people problems without eugenics?

It’s described in TFA, or at least the part relevant to the oysters:

> Every time it rains, hundreds of millions of gallons of untreated household wastewater pours right out into the harbor. And that shouldn’t be a thing.

The problem is that New York has an ancient combined stormwater+sewage system that is designed for the rainstorms of long ago, so regular flooding events overwhelm sewage and require these overflows in the harbor lest the pipes back up into houses and the street. Modern cities get around this by both reducing the amount of nonporous surfaces (and thus diverting less water into the system), or by separating stormwater drainage so that an overflow isn’t mixed with sewage.

Yes, so some view it as economically cheaper for many humans to cease living, rather than to upgrade the infrastructure.

My answer to them is

"You first"

The problem is that they get power and enforce their views on others.

who is actually in power and actually enforcing involuntary population control in a democracy?

it's definitely a very fringe opinion.

What a gentleman.