Baby Oysters, Snug in Reef Balls, Now Growing Up in Tribeca Waters

One of 80 reef balls splashes down in the Hudson, near Pier 26. Each ball contains oyster spat, an early stage in the bivalve's development. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

Oysters are no strangers these days to the Hudson River waters off Tribeca. In recent years, they’ve been growing and thriving, especially on the local piles and floating docks. But soon, those bivalves will have lots of company.

Last week, a floating crane dropped 80 concrete reef balls, seeded with tiny juvenile oysters, onto the river bottom between Piers 26 and 32. (Roughly from Beach to Canal Streets). Called spat, each baby oyster is barely larger than a grain of sand. 

“Hopefully we’ll see these oysters mature over the season where they are eating a lot and growing a ton, and as they do they clean water,” said Carrie Roble, vice president of the Hudson River Park Trust’s River Project. “They’re amazing filter feeders.”

The work is part of the continuing efforts by the River Project to study and rebuild the once abundant oyster habitats that centuries of over-harvesting and pollution had destroyed.

Researchers will be studying not only the health of the maturing oysters, but also the community of other aquatic animals drawn to the reef balls and the growing underwater habitats around them. The community of creatures in the nearby sediment will be studied as well.

“We hope they will recruit more oysters and more life,” Roble said, “and by doing so build up a nice habitat for other fish or estuarine species.” (An estuary, like the lower Hudson River, is where fresh and saltwater mix.) 

The project continues in August with the installation into the river of gabions, rectangular cages filled with oyster and clam shells that also are seeded with spat.

Roble said the Tribeca section of the Hudson River sanctuary is an especially good one for study because of the many years of baseline data compiled by the original River Project based on Pier 26, and more recently on Pier 40.

The reef balls arrived by barge in shipping containers from Red Hook, where people from the Billion Oyster Project released oyster larvae, a type of plankton, into the water. The larvae, Roble said, “often want to settle near other oysters, or on substrate like concrete. So they find these reef balls and settle, continuing on in their life cycle and becoming those juvenile oysters.”

Roble said researchers will be studying the results of the project over the next three years “to better understand what effect it’s having on the water and what impact it’s having on the local estuarine community.” 

In the meantime, the public can get a first-hand look at how River Project staff monitor oysters in the Hudson and study their impact on the river ecology. The next Shell-Abrate Oysters, a program of the River Project, takes place on Wednesday, July 21, at 6 p.m. on Pier 40 at Houston Street.

In September, 2017, giant oysters were discovered on the bottom of floating docks at Pier 25 in Tribeca. In this video, made at the time, Carrie Roble of the Hudson River Park Trust talks about the oysters, and the conditions in the river that have helped them thrive.