oyster garden and oyster reef

Rocking The Boat’s On Water Program was requested to help reintroduce oysters to the Bronx River. This is a way to help the River because oysters filter feed and in doing so, help to reduce pollution in the water. This is just one way that Rocking the Boat students are helping to clean up the River and, at the same time, bringing Eastern American oysters back from local extinction.

Instead of depending on waste water treatment, we decided to place seven oyster gardens in the Bronx River estuary. Each garden contains approximately 80 oysters. The oyster garden project has been on-going since 2004 and including the creation of an artificial oyster reef near the mouth of the river and also monitoring oyster larvae called spat in the estuary (done by Job Skills Apprentices). Since the On-Water students placed our most recent oysters in October 2007, they have grown. This shows that the Bronx River is capable of supporting oysters for the short term. Our hope is to protect the River so that the oysters can grow and reproduce over the long term.

Our partners in this project are Natural Resources Group, who has provided materials, resources, information and training, the Environmental Protection Agency, who have provided funding, and the NY/NJ Baykeepers who have provided training and who gave us our seed oysters.

The process of preparing and placing the oyster gardens in the River was challenging and exciting. We had to come up with a strategy to protect the gardens because last summer all of our gardens (3 in all) vanished. This fall, we came up with the ideas of using different materials to anchor the gardens and we placed waterproof tags with cautionary information as well as contact information. With hope we’ll see these 500 seed oysters grow up to be full-fledged adults!

In the summer of 2006 and the summer of 2007, Rocking the Boat’s On-Water students and Apprentices help to build an artificial oyster reef in the Bronx River in conjunction with an environmental group called NRG (Natural Resource Group). NRG is part of the NYC Parks Department. The oyster reef was created to help the oysters that are in the Bronx River by creating a habitat space for the spat (baby oysters). The spat need a hard surface that contains calcium, so we put clam shells in netted bags placed the bags in the river so that the spat can land on the shells and grow on top of one another. This is important because oysters are only attracted to things containing calcium and if the spat doesn’t have any place to settle then they will die, leaving us without oysters to help clean the Bronx River. Oysters help clean the water by filtering 50 gallons of water a day and increasing habitat space by 50 times.