A prairie oyster, sir. Prairie oyster?

Sir. 1965 Rolex Oyster Perpetual.

So we were inspired by the oyster, but I was also inspired by the life cycle of the oyster.

It's a prairie oyster. Swallow it quickly.

I'll start with a prairie oyster. Yes, ma'am.

So the oyster was the basis for a manifesto like urban design project that I did about the New York Harbor called oyster tecture.

It can move from a fertilized egg to a spat, which is when they're floating through the water, and when they're ready to attach onto another oyster, to an adult male oyster or female oyster, in a number of weeks.

Here we are, back to our hero, the oyster.

I'll start with a prairie oyster, also, whatever it is.

The girl is Elizabeth Tyson of the Oyster Bay Tysons.

And also showing oyster gardening for the community along its edges.

Already, commercial oyster larvae are dying at large scales in some places.

And already, commercial oyster larvae are dying at large scales in some places.

And one oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water a day.

I thought I'd sell her to this fella, Rufe Watries, at Oyster Bay.

And this glorious, readily available device is basically a floating raft with an oyster nursery below.

Here's the Gowanus future with the oyster rafts on the shorelines the flupsification of the Gowanus.

And it is of course Sanforized, sir, noniron, and also available in chocolate, oyster or clerical grey.

Basically, New York was built on the backs of oystermen, and our streets were literally built over oyster shells.

This image is an image of an oyster cart, which is now as ubiquitous as the hotdog cart is today.

But we imagine, with our calculations, that by 2050, you might be able to sink your teeth into a Gowanus oyster.

So now I want to introduce you to my new hero in the global climate change war, and that is the eastern oyster.

Architect Kate Orff sees the oyster as an agent of urban change. Bundled into beds and sunk into city rivers, oysters slurp up pollution and make legendarily dirty waters clean thus driving even more innovation in oyster tecture. Orff shares her vision for an urban landscape that links nature and humanity for mutual benefit.

We came back to our pile, it was covered with hundreds of pounds of oyster mushrooms, and the color changed to a light form.

We also learned at this time that you could eat an oyster about the size of a dinner plate in the Gowanus Canal itself.

Oyster reefs also covered about a quarter of our harbor and were capable of filtering water in the harbor in a matter of days.

And finally, how much fun it would be to watch the flupsy parade and cheer on the oyster spats as they go down to the reef.

Or are you the sort of man who'd bring his wife all this way to tell her something of great importance and then shut up as tight as an oyster?

And the core idea of oyster tecture is to harness the biological power of mussels, eelgrass and oysters species that live in the harbor and, at the same time, harness the power of people who live in the community towards making change now.

We reinterpreted this life cycle on the scale of our sight and took the Gowanus as a giant oyster nursery where oysters would be grown up in the Gowanus, then paraded down in their spat stage and seeded out on the Bayridge Reef.

Compared to the body of an oyster, for example, chimpanzees and humans are at least 99 identical bone for bone, muscle for muscle, nerve for nerve, organ for organ. If anything, the DNA comparison underestimates the profound similarity of the human and ape bodies in the great tapestry of nature.

Might such ease and efficiency not also fuel market instability, and serve the interests of intermediaries rather than their clients? Phrases like sand in the machine and grit in the oyster, which were pejorative in the prelapsarian days of 2006, are now used to support regulatory or fiscal changes that may slow down trading and reduce its volume.