Abstract
In the first half of the twentieth century, Jamaica Bay underwent a major regime shift—the near complete loss of Crassostrea virginica, the American oyster. During the 1800s, Jamaica Bay was famous for the abundance and quality of its oysters. Although historic documents from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries refer to natural oyster populations and oyster harvesting in Jamaica Bay, the advent of oyster seeding in the 1860s ushered in a robust oystering industry (Black, 1981). “Rockaway” oysters from Jamaica Bay were prized for their size and flavor by restaurateurs, and hundreds of “oystermen” made their living on the bay. The oystermen of 1905—near the peak of the Jamaica Bay oyster industry—likely had no way of knowing that in just thirty-five years not only would the seeded oyster harvesting industry in Jamaica Bay be gone, but that oysters would be virtually absent from Jamaica Bay. They did not have the information necessary to show that Jamaica Bay oysters—and the ecosystem services they provided—were not resilient to the natural and human disturbances of the early twentieth century (figure 7–1).