On Thursday November 10th 2016 the Environmental-Water-Pollution and Waste group went to Governor’s Island for a day of service at the Billion Oyster Project. We left school in the morning and took a ferry to Governors Island which houses the main complex for the Billion Oyster Project. The Billion Oyster Project is non-profit organization that spawns and raises oysters the repopulate the rivers around New York to filter the water. What we did was drill clusters of Oysters and tag the clusters for scientists and school who want to study them. Oysters grow on the shells of old oysters. There can be up to 40 baby oysters attached to one dead oyster shell. This means that the oysters are not being hurt because we only drill through the dead oyster shell. We tagged about 220 clusters of oysters The other thing we did was clean oyster shells the have been donated by restaurants in New York. We cleaned them because the cleaner they are, the more oysters can grow on the old shells. The whole day we were working outside by the water. It was surprisingly chilly on Governors Island, but we still had a lot of fun. I was really surprised at how many oysters have already been grown and put into the water. Currently they are at over 27 million oysters, which is a huge amount. From working with BOP, we now want to focus more on wastewater and sewage which is great because the people we met with knew a lot about that so we hope to reach out to them again soon.
