ABSTRACT
The eastern oyster (also called the American oyster), Crassostrea virginica, can be found from the east coast of Canada to Argentina (Coen, Luckenbach, and Breitburg 1999) and, since the early twentieth century, also on the west coast of the United States (Kurlansky 2006). In the Hudson-Raritan Estuary (HRE), archeological findings suggest that the eastern oyster has made this region its home since the end of the last ice age (Steimle 2005), and shell middens date back 6500 years (Kurlansky 2006). Before the twentieth century, the oyster reefs covered approximately 350 square miles of the HRE, from Sandy Hook, NJ, north as far as Ossining, NY, and especially in the Raritan Bay; the Navesink and Shrewsbury Rivers; the Arthur Kill; Jamaica Bay; and Newark Bay, and served as an economic foundation for much of the region (Ingersoll 1887). The natural beds covered the shoreline and all major islands and shoals (Steimle 2005). But by 1812 many of those beds were depleted, and a commercial oyster industry took over, replenishing large oyster beds with imported seed oysters from Chesapeake Bay and the Long Island Sound.
