N.Y. Harbor Oysters Make Comeback

.c The Associated Press

 By RICHARD PYLE

NEW YORK (AP) - Oysters, which flourished for centuries in New York Harbor
before pollution and dredging wiped them out, have a place to grow anew - an
underwater mound of shells near the Statue of Liberty.

But don't look for them on any menus just yet.

A police fireboat sluiced 260 tons of fossilized shells off a barge into 16
feet of water Thursday in the latest project to restore the harbor.

If all goes according to plan, the shells - dredged from a 1,000-year-old
oyster bed in Chesapeake Bay - will form a hard-surface reef that will
attract new oyster larvae and the plankton and algae on which they thrive,
project managers said.

Within weeks, the larvae should have settled and started to grow, said
Benjamin Longstreth, director of the $35,000 program for Baykeeper, a private
ecological group based in Sandy Hook, N.J.

``The point of doing this is the great ecological benefits,'' Longstreth said
during a tour of the harbor to observe the spraying of the 10,000 bushels of
shells. ``We don't aim to eat the oysters off these oyster beds. New York
Harbor water has gotten a lot cleaner, but it isn't that clean yet.''

Oysters filter silt and other impurities to clean the water naturally, said
Francis X. O'Beirne, a marine ecologist at the Virginia Institute of Marine
Sciences.

The Hudson-Raritan Estuary that forms New York Harbor once supported 35
square miles of natural oyster beds. Oysters were once so plentiful, in fact,
that Liberty and Ellis islands were called Oyster Islands by New York's
original Dutch settlers.

Overharvesting, pollution and dredging ended oyster fishing here early in the
20th century.

Officials say water quality has already been improved considerably by the
cleaning up of industrial pollutants from the upper Hudson River and other
measures.

``Although our work is not yet done, these achievements give us confidence
that oyster-restoration projects like this one have a real chance of
success,'' said Jean Fox, regional director of the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency.

The technique of building underwater beds of oyster shells has been used
previously in Long Island Sound and Chesapeake Bay.

AP-NY-06-25-99 1038EDT