Ellis Island the region. The oyster beds remained a major source of food for nearly three centuries. Landfilling to build the railyards of the Lehigh Valley Railroad and the Central Railroad of New Jersey eventually obliterated the oyster beds, engulfed one island, and brought the shoreline much closer to the others. During the colonial period, Little Oyster Island was known as Dyre's, then Bucking Island. In the 1760s, after some pirates were hanged from one of the island's scrubby trees, it became known as Gibbet Island. It was acquired by Samuel Ellis, a colonial New Yorker and merchant possibly from Wales, around
Pacific oyster of cultch), silting (sediment runoff from land), and cluster separation (process of breaking up clusters of oysters into as many individual oysters as possible). In New Zealand, the Pacific oyster was unintentionally introduced in the 1950s, most likely through ballast water and from the hulls of ships. Aquaculture farmers at the time noticed the Pacific oyster outcompeted the endemic species, the Sydney rock oyster ("Saccostrea glomerata"), which naturally occurs in intertidal areas in the North Island. Early experiments in rock oyster cultivation procedures attached spat to cement-covered sticks and laid them down in racks. The farmers noticed, however, the Pacific