.::pǝɥɔʎsԀ::.

Same water. Same tank. But the one on the right has oysters. A single oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day. Oyster reefs in the Chesapeake Bay once filtered the entire Bay, 19 trillion gallons, in under a week. Today, with less than 1% of the original oyster population remaining, it takes over a year. We ate them. We dredged their reefs. We dumped nitrogen into their water until the algae blooms choked what was left. And now we build billion dollar water treatment plants to do what oysters did for free. The Billion Oyster Project is working to restore oyster reefs in New York Harbor. Restored reefs in Maryland's Harris Creek can now filter the entire creek in under 10 days and remove nitrogen equivalent to 20,000 bags of fertilizer every year. Nature had this figured out. We just have to restore the oysters and get out of the way.