Building On Our Sag Harbor Oyster Reef

sag harbor

Jul 1

We headed out at low tide in Sag Harbor yesterday morning to check on last year’s oyster reef planting off Steinbeck Park, and bolster the reef with another 100K spat-on-shell oysters!

Before getting in the water, we needed to set up our makeshift field station and get everything staged for monitoring and deployment.

Our Aquaculture Specialist, Kate-Rossi Snook, headed into the water to get eyes on last year’s planting, while one of our interns, Lillie Henthorne and I began work collecting data on the new spat-on-shell oysters we’d be deploying.

First order of business was to count and measure subsets of the spat-on-shell Kate grew in her remote setting tank at our Back to the Bays Shellfish Nursery Annex on Shelter Island so we can estimate how many oysters were going in the water. Our first one-liter subset was collected from the bags, and we got to work counting the babies.

We were happy with the numbers we saw, which are reflective of a successful “set” -- one over-achieving oyster shell featured a record high of 32 baby oysters! It’s normal to see a range of zero to 20+ little oysters set on the recycled shell substrate. After the oyster larvae are poured into the remote setting tanks filled with bagged shell, they circulate in the water until they find a shell to affix to, and it happens in a natural random way so there is a good amount of variation in our counts. Once these juvenile oysters are growing out in the open water, there will be some natural mortality and decrease in these numbers as the healthiest oysters outcompete weaker ones, and some die off due to predation and other factors, so not all of these will make it for the long term. While we have noted in our monitoring at other reef sites clumps of up to 8 oysters, on average a single recycled shell supports 3 new full-grown oysters.

Now, on to welcoming these oysters into their new home so that they may start growing into the reef habitat structure we are looking to create. After numerous trips wading out to the reef site and back to shore to reload our totes, we accomplished our mission of adding new oysters to our Sag Harbor reef!

We will be back throughout the summer to continue to monitor and assess the year 1 and year 2 plantings as visibility was poor and we’d like to conduct more detailed subset sampling of the year 1 plantings in particular. Typically, it is in year 3 that we make the final assessment as to long-term site suitability and ability for these reef sites to support even larger volumes of spat-on-shell. We collected sediment samples and deployed one of our temperature loggers that will also aid in making this determination and look forward to keeping the community and our donors up to date on our progress.

Sag Harbor is a special place and we are committed to continuing to expand our work to help water quality conditions, and enhance shellfish populations and habitat availability in these waters. If you’d like to learn more, support these efforts, and get involved with upcoming Stewardship Sessions, please check out our Sag Harbor Stewardship Page for updates as the season progresses!