From Flushing Station to 42nd Street, more germs ride the #7 line each day than people do in a year. A closer look at the microecology of NYC’s microscopic commuters.

At Bryant Park – former site of glaciers, Lenape trails and water reservoirs – change is the norm.. Research from The World Without Us by Alan Weisman and Mannahatta by Eric Sanderson.

Off the grid and hidden in plain sight, U Thant Island is made from the leftovers from the 7 line’s Steinway tunnel and is home to NYC’s cormorant population. Interviews with John Mattera, Parks & Recreation Librarian, NYC Department of Parks and Recreation and Dr. Susan Elbin, Director of Conservation, New York City Audubon Society.

29 feet under the East River’s surface, fish chat, flirt, and test out their best pick-up lines. Fish speak interpreted.

Back in the day Queens Bay was NYC’s raw bar, home of the largest oyster population on the East Coast.

Meat in a plastic bag? Choose it, weigh it, slaughter it, buy it, cook it, eat it. With readings of quotes from www.humansociety.org by Assemblywoman Barbara Clark.

The East River’s high level of estrogen has the local fish swimming sideways.

The expansion of Manhattan’s East River parks mean a real estate boom for the indigenous eastside squirrels.

Meet Dr. Steven Handel as he begins his “Weed Walk” tour of Sunnyside Rail Yards

Those beautiful orange seed pods disguise a stone-cold tree killa!

Check your shoes! These sticky brits, also known as rib wort, have been known to stiffen collars and pants in Ye Olde NYC for two centuries.

Don’t put this poisonous weed’s juice in your coffee, although caterpillers love it! That’s how they develop their toxic chemistry that keeps the birds away.

After a rough day working the rails or in your cubicle lather up with a fistful of sudsy bouncing bet, aka “soap wart.

Not to be confused with golden rods, these mustard-tasting weeds have NYC eyes watering and itching every fall.

One foot tall with small green purses on top, poor man’s pepper could still spice up a bland sandwich.

No soil? No Problem. NYC’s oldest lifeform blows onto rock and turns it into soil.

This spicy-smelling medieval medicine muscles out seeds and wildflowers in its bid to dominate NYC’s parks.

Up on that green roof, there’s something slowly crawling from rock to rock.

Next time you’re chomping on a raw carrot, think of its frilly, first cousin.

If you see brown propellers drifting in the wind this fall, they are the male and female tree of heaven beginning their slightly smelly mating ritual.

In NYC, anything can happen, even a Japanese maple growing between the fence and sidewalk.

This tough weed gets its name from its deep golden yellow and pale lemon yellow good looks, not its taste.

If you think the stakes are high and conditions crowded in the NYC real estate market, check out any pile of gravel in the street, where weeds are working hard to gain a root-hold and stake out a life on the mean city streets.

See a small, green squirrel tail sticking up in that alley? It is more likely to be NYC’s fastest-growing weed.

Even in man-made gardens, gregarious mother nature joins the plant party. Stealthy weeds lay low to avoid detection, and lovable three-leafed clovers hope to get lucky.

At Pete’s grill the peaches are mmm, so sweet!

In NYC, even the insects have their own agenda, so self-reliant street weeds get down to business and pollinate themselves.

Although its edible relatives are the tomato and potato, this yellow and white beauty is a feast for the eyes but not the mouth.

From 5th Avenue to Times Square, the price of real estate is directly related to what size dog you keep. Canine demographics across two boroughs.

Calvary Cemetery, one the largest urban necropolises in the nation, has an ecology and chemistry all its own. A look at what goes in, what comes out, and what we should know about NYC’s dead.

Asian long-horned Beetles slip past customs by hiding in Poplar shipping crates. Threatened by these hungry critters, forests are put into quarantine. Interview with Marlene Bombara from New York Asian Long Horned Beetle Cooperative Eradication Program.

Away from the street and behind walls of brick are well-tended garden oases.

Homosapiens aren’t the only New Yorkers riding NYC’s subway cars. Aquatic New Yorkers strap-hang in decomissioned cars which have been used to build reefs around Manhattan Island.

PS 19 Students connect the taste of lettuce to their neighborhoods and the world at large. Charis Stozek, Learning Garden coordinator at PS 19, and Wendy Johnson, organic gardening mentor.

New Yorkers have tried dozens of techniques, all unsuccessful, to control the population of the urban freeloaders known as Rock Doves.

The urban chicken occupies two spots in Queen’s Corona Park, the egg-maker for suburban farmers & the heavy in backroom cock-fights.

While horses and wagons were delivering ice, the Trylon and Perisphere were being raised in Flushing Meadows. Gloria Stern and Esther Glass recall glimpses of the future they caught as young girls at the new World’s Fair grounds.

Robert Moses-created lakes are an unlikely pest control system for a voracious walking fish that’s stranger than fiction. Interviews with Mike Feller, Chief Naturalist, NYC Department of Parks and Recreation, and audio clips from Snakehead Terror, Swarm of the Snakehead, Night of the Snakehead Fish films.

Despite Giuliani’s ban on beekeeping in the city, bees continue to pollinate the region’s plants thanks to environmental centers, antique working farms, historic houses and, secretly, on rooftops. Interviews with John Howe, Brooklyn Beekeeper and Founder of the New York City Beekeeping Meetup, Guillermo Fernandez, Founder, the Bee Conservancy. Russ Berr, Beekeeper for Alley Pond.

This former ash dumping ground became the site of the 1964 World’s Fair, and is also the site of some fishy and fowl activities.

Bacteria found an ideal home in the Queens Botanical Garden’s new geothermal well, thanks to heat from groundwater and iron left over from Flushing Meadow’s former life as an ash dump.
Lucy Wong and Jeremy Lockhart, NYC Department of Design and Construction