Their shells make great fertilizer, and the parts that restaurants throw away can be used to shore up New York City.

What if I told you that over 200 years ago some of the best oysters in the world were being harvested here?

When Europeans first arrived in New York Harbor, the oyster reefs everywhere 200,000 acres of oyster reef they were once a big part of the culture of New York are the food culture of New York.

Oysters used to be sold on basically like hot, dark cards.

What happened to them?

Way eighth, Um, early New York boomed on an oyster economy, but it turns out these oyster reefs had a much more important role.

Mhm.

Uh huh.

We had tragedy happened in Superstorm.

Sandy.

People lost their lives.

There were waves hitting structures because this rich three D mosaic of protective wetlands is no longer there.

That's something a team of designers and engineers are trying to solve.

Funded by a federal disaster relief grant and designed by scape, a landscape architecture firm, the Living Breakwaters project is meant to safeguard part of New York City's coastline.

It's a roughly two mile long chain of breakwaters that air designed in a ecological way.

Thio create fish habitat.

It is reducing risk, and the incredible wave action that was faced by communities.

And a major component of the project is the small and briny oyster.

Oysters are ecosystem engineers.

In the harbor.

They helped Thio conglomerate and create reefs.

They filter water, they clean water.

But waster reefs actually reduce the impact of storms and storm surges and things like that when you had a complex three dimensional shoreline that is both oyster reefs and salt marsh and all of that working together.

In other words, before New Yorkers polluted and over harvested their harbor, oyster reefs used to provide a natural protection against big waves like the ones produced by Hurricane Sandy without the oyster reefs and with the whole shoreline has fundamentally changed.

New York is more vulnerable toe storms.

That's why, since 2014, the nonprofit Billion Oyster Project has been working to restore the city's oyster reefs.

The group starts by collecting restaurants, discarded oyster shells, drying them and then seating them with oyster larvae.

Once back in the water those shells become the habitat for other oysters to build on.

So far, about 28 million oysters have been installed in various sites around the harbor.

And while the water quality of the harbor has improved, the number of oysters in the water is only a tiny portion of what it used to be, and they're still not safe to eat.

But something recently changed for restoration.

To be successful, you need recruitment of wild oysters from the system, meaning wild baby oysters need to be able to find these reef installations in orderto latch on and establish a home for themselves.

That's something we've seen in very small numbers periodically over the years when we started looking in earnest at all of our sites around the city.

And it's true for just about everywhere we have oysters this year, there's just a lot more natural recruitment.

It's a way so cool.

So that's a a really exciting sign.

Ah, large scale arrival of wild baby oysters is good news for the living breakwaters project Oysters air not going to keep the water out of New York, but oysters that, combined with breakwaters, can be an integrated solution for these breakwaters air seated with oysters and the oysters will a glamorous on the structure attach onto it, grow and form their own kind of layer of complexity on top?

It's also a social enterprise in the sense that were engaging school Children and teachers through the billion oyster project.

So these guys, they're basically forming a reef, right?

They're building more and more structure.

The Living breakwaters project will be in construction through 2020.

But rebuilding an entire ecosystem can take time or thinks that by 2050 the habitat around the breakwaters will be fully revitalized.

I think New Yorkers need to get into this new paradigm of being a coastal city again, living with water, embracing our watery context, not fortifying ourselves off, but understanding what it means.