A fleet of kayaks left the south shore of Staten Island recently in search of oysters. Their destinations were a series of breakwaters a few hundred yards offshore. The breakwaters are essentially man-made islands of jagged rocks, intended to stave off beach erosion that’s been ongoing for decades. If it turns out they can host oyster reefs, too, all the better. Whales and dolphins have begun returning to New York Harbor; why not oysters, which, in these parts, once numbered in the billions? Though unsafe to eat from city waters, oysters are among the most efficient purifying devices, each adult capable of filtering up to fifty gallons a day. Mike McCann, the director of science and research for the Billion Oyster Project, was in the bow of a two-seater, and explained, as he paddled, that the organization had already seeded one of the breakwaters with oyster larvae, to expedite the process. His mission on this day was to visit an unseeded one, in the hope of documenting what are known as “natural recruits”—baby oysters that might have migrated downriver from the Tappan Zee, say, like suburbanites recolonizing the city.
The man in the stern of McCann’s kayak, as it happened, had come down from the Tappan Zee himself, after having spent the morning unwittingly windsurfing over local oyster beds. Early indications, as the paddlers approached, were that the breakwaters had done an exceptional job, at least, of recruiting gulls and cormorants. They pulled around to the lee side of a so-called reef street, an arm of rocks extending perpendicularly from the central spine, and were joined by Pippa Brashear, the resilience principal at Scape, the landscape-architecture firm that led the design of the breakwaters. She noted that the individual rocks, each as heavy as a pyramid stone, had been carefully placed, rather than dumped, to maximize stability and to create the nooks and crannies favored by marine life: mussels, crabs, sponges. “Maybe a red-beard sponge,” McCann said, examining one specimen. “They make us feel like we live in the tropics. We actually have brightly colored wildlife in the harbor! It’s not just brown and olive.”
It was low tide and the rocks just above the waterline were slick, causing McCann to remark on the wisdom of New York State rules against trespassing on riprap. He spotted an oyster scar, the whitish stain left by a shell, like a ghost bicycle by the roadside. “It’s stressful for an oyster in the intertidal zone in New York City,” he said, speculating that a parasite might have killed this one in its infancy. The breakwater was only a year old. Then he found another possible culprit: an “oyster drill”—a small snail with shell-penetrating teeth and a proboscis for slurping mollusk meat. He handed it to the windsurfer, who recalled childhood afternoons spent sending hermit crabs on “vacations,” but then thought better of airing out his old pitching arm on unsteady feet.
Seeking higher and drier ground, the windsurfer noticed a hard hat encrusted with barnacles. “Which union?” Brashear joked. McCann spied an errant pumpkin. Brashear found a golf ball. The windsurfer gazed north at the Gatsbyesque mansions on the shore and wondered if any of them belonged to a heavy hitter on the P.G.A. Tour. He was jolted out of his reverie by a whiff of guano in the breeze. An almost fluorescent sheen lined the crest of the breakwater. Holding noses, the oyster hunters climbed over to the far side, with a clear view of the Amboys and the mouth of the Raritan. “The old maps showed a lot of clam beds there,” Brashear said. “And they were farmed, actually, until a couple years ago. A lot of the clams that you’d get on Long Island, they’d grow them here. They can’t harvest them here, because the water’s not clean”—hence the need for more oysters—“so they take them out to Long Island for a while to cure.” A more typical suburban migration. The windsurfer made a mental note: beware of Long Island clams?
This side of the breakwater was lined with tide pools formed from ECOncrete, a composite cement that mimics natural rock formations. And here, at last, near some crabs locked in a coital embrace, was a fledgling oyster. McCann used a caliper to measure its breadth: forty-two millimetres. “Probably settled here in September of 2024,” he guessed. With any luck, barring parasites and hungry snails and weaponized Titleists, it would live another six or seven years—long enough to greet some neighbors. ♦
