Counting Oysters

On Saturday, August 27, I took my upper level marine ecology class on a field trip to learn about intertidal oyster reefs. We were lucky to be able to visit the Burton 4-H Center on Tybee Island, where just this summer they installed a living shoreline to help prevent erosion along the banks of the camp. The premise of creating living shorelines is to protect the shore from erosion by mimicking nature - in this case, by creating oyster reefs - rather than traditional hardened structures. The class was able to visit the shoreline to count the number of new baby oysters settling there every meter from the low water line to the top of the oyster shell structure. Eventually, they will plot out the distribution of the oysters along the intertidal zone, and compare fauna found in different locations on the reefs. We hope to keep visiting this particular shoreline in the future to see how the numbers change. Stay tuned to find out this year's results.