Over the past 10 years, Mr Street has been providing tiny oyster larvae with a suitable environment on which to settle and grow.
Their favourite habitat is clean, weathered oyster shells and Mr Street has been providing these in two ways - by stringing shells together on stainless steel wires and suspending them in the waters of Bluff Harbour, and by spreading shells directly on to the Foveaux Strait seabed.
Tagging and monitoring has shown as many as 30 larvae can establish themselves on a single shell, with most juvenile oysters breaking away from their host shell and striking out on their own when they are about 18 months old and about the size of a $2 coin.
The project has already received some financial support from the Bluff Oyster Management Co.
Mr Street believes the results of his small-scale experiments have been so successful the time is right for the enhancement programme to be expanded.
"My plan would be for some financial backing to do this on a large scale. [But] there are millions of examples of public companies being set up to do something and going in too big. I would like to see an enhancement programme expanded step by step over a lengthy period of time."
He said he was already providing several hundred host shells annually and would eventually like to see "several hundred thousand" distributed.
The ultimate aim was to significantly enlarge the oyster beds, which would allow more oysters to be harvested each year.
Since 1996, the annual quota has been 15 million oysters, but in 2003 the industry voluntarily halved the quota so the beds could regenerate after a devastating outbreak of bonamia, a parasite which does not affect humans but which kills oysters.
The health of the oyster beds has improved to the point where next year's quota will be increased to 9.7 million oysters.
Investing in a large-scale enhancement programme would reap benefits for the industry, Mr Street said.
"Only 11 boats are allowed to dredge commercially, so in effect they are farming collectively. There would be no question of them investing and someone else getting the benefits."
Mr Street (78) spent 32 years as a seafood researcher with the Ministry of Fisheries before retiring in 1986.
He then established his own consultancy business focused on enhancing commercial and recreational stocks of oysters, paua and rock lobster off the South Island coast.
He said the Romans were the first to realise providing clean shells would encourage oyster larvae to settle and grow.
The technique had also been successfully used off the coast of the United States for many years.
Farmers, foresters and gardeners had also long realised the importance of preparing a welcoming environment for new life, he said.
"Laying down oyster shells for the larvae is like finely tilling soil and planting the seeds immediately to give them more of an advantage against the weeds, or like growing radiata pine seedlings in a nursery until they are big enough to survive then planting them out in a forest.
"We are doing the same thing for the larvae - giving nature a helping hand."
Oyster breeding
Oysters are hermaphrodites and continually change their sex throughout their lives.
They generally breed as males first before switching to become females.
Some female oysters produce up to 800,000 eggs a year; Foveaux Strait oysters (Ostrea chilensis) produce about 50,000.
In New Zealand, spawning takes place in late spring and early summer.
Unlike most other varieties of oysters, female Foveaux Strait oysters retain their eggs in their mantle cavity where the eggs are fertilised by sperm carried on ocean currents.
Larvae develop inside the female for almost a month after fertilisation before being expelled into the ocean.
About the size of a grain of sand, each larva immediately begins to look for somewhere to settle.
Many will spend their entire lives growing only a few centimetres from their mother.
Only a tiny fraction of larvae survive. The rest are carried away by currents and die.
