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If not the world, at least the Mystic River could be Wynn's oyster

If Wynn gets the state's casino license for greater Boston, it says it will pay a local clean-water group to "seed" the Mystic's mouth with up to 250,000 oysters as a natural water-filtration system that could also help re-establish an estuary ecosystem there.

The Massachusetts Oyster Project has been working to bring oysters back to the waters of Boston Harbor because the bivalve's natural feeding habits - basically opening up and letting water flow in - are great at filtering particulates out of the water, some 30 gallons' worth of water a day.

The project says seed oysters go for about 4 cents in bulk, which would mean about about a $10,000 Wynn donation to the oyster project.

Wynn will provide funding for the Massachusetts Oyster Project to create beds of recycled oyster shells in areas of the Mystic River and place live oysters on the beds to establish active oyster reefs. The use of oyster beds is fitting for the site which, in the early 1800s, was the home of the W. Atwood Company's Oyster Farm which supplied oysters to the Atwoods Oyster House - now known as the historic Union Oyster House, America's oldest restaurant. This "living shoreline" will encourage regeneration of the harbor through the re-introduction of more than 100 other fish and wildlife species which oyster reefs attract.

Wynn is competing with Mohegan Sun, which want to build a casino on land owned by Suffolk Downs in Revere.


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Comments

How can you beat that ? I'm all in for Wynn and his clams casino !

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Wokka wokka ;)

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I was literally drinking milk when I read that. My monitor thanks you! COTD!

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There havent been any Oysters in the Mystic in nye on 4 score and 2 years I say.

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Contrast with Suffolk Downs, who dumped horse manure into Boston Harbor to save money.
http://www.wcvb.com/news/local/metro/Horse-track-fined-1-25M-for-illegal...

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Interesting. That's not exactly a huge amount. Be fun to see an anti-casino group do a fundraiser or something and come up with the money independent of the Wynn deal.

IMO, the Wynn people should spend the 10K up front and just do this thing, THEN press release the shit out of it. Don't hold it out like a bride, do it as a goodwill gesture. It would be a fraction of their costs, and they'd have tangible evidence of not JUST being an all-consuming monster.

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Or forget anything to do with casinos. $10k is nothing to casino groups, anti-casino groups, or the Boston metro area in general. If this is a good idea, publicize it and it will get done. I'll chip in.

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The Mystic Valley Watershed Association is in the thick of all things Mystic River.

http://mysticriver.org/myrwa-blog/

They are a kindly and fun advocacy group born in the place Nancy Anderson helped to build, the Lincoln Filene Center at Tufts.

They've mentioned overtures from Wynn in the past.

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If there was a kickstarter, I would donate!

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10K is the cost of the bulk oysters only. 250,000 @ $0.04 = $10,000. I imagine there are labor and resource costs also.

I really like the idea of a Kickstarter, let Wynn fund something else..

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to eat some Everett Oysters in my fancy hotel room overlooking the LNG tanks and the underbelly of the Tobin. Can you's say paradise?

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Animals sent to clean up an area must end up clean and healthy, right?

That's the underlying cost of this, and the reason that the MA Oyster Project isn't just chucking oyster seeds off a boat every day: they are inedible. Maybe in 50 years all of the cleaning will have been done and the oyster bed will be a source of food and commerce for future generations, but in the near/medium term, those things might as well be radioactive. In fact, they may be.

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