We have noted the oysters that are cultivated in the Gowanus Canal and studied in the past. There’s even a Gowanus Community Oyster Garden Stewards group that was keeping a blog for a while. Here’s an excerpt of a new story on scienceline that includes our Gowanus oysters:

It’s even stranger when you consider that the oyster was just pulled out of the Gowanus Canal, historically one of the filthiest and most wretched bodies of water in Brooklyn. The four-mile channel has been used as a dumping ground for industrial waste and sewage for most of its 138-year history and was recently noted for harboring the sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea. With her hands protected by only a thin layer of white latex, Jackie Godleski, a 47-year-old personal assistant to a music executive and a resident of Brooklyn, pulls a basket full of live oysters out of the canal. She selects one of the small, gray, rock-like mollusks from the hundreds in the clear plastic tub in front of her and begins to scrub it delicately with her little red toothbrush.

“What I normally do, because they have a lot of sediment on them, is I flush the oysters out. I give them a little bit of a shower,” says Godleski from under a profusion of burgundy-red hair that partially obscures her face. “This water is really, really dirty today,” she adds. Godleski’s goal in cleaning the oysters is to aid them in their survival and also to monitor their growth. She wants to determine if oysters can flourish in the canal at all.

They are hearty creatures and actually can do a lot to help clean the water if they’re there in sufficient numbers. Did they really call the Gowanus “wretched”?