On 12/5 my group, Ruthanne, Ruby, and Lindsay, and another group, William, Luke, Atticus, and Solomon met up with a woman named Robina Taliaferrow. She took us around Harbor School High school. The school is connected to the Billion Oyster Project and has their students scuba dive, take care of the oysters, and boat around the Hudson River. We got a short tour of the school and then headed out to count oysters and crabs and fish. We counted the living and dead oysters in one cage. We also counted how many live animals we found that were lurking in and around the oysters.

I learned that one oyster shell, left over from a restaurant or some other place, can spawn 10-20 other oysters. There are setting tanks that hold up to 50 thousand recycled shells with a total of more than 2.5 million oysters after the set. The oysters help clean the water so the more there are alive and the faster they spawn, the better the water will be.

I remember in the beginning of the tour we were taken to what looked like a ‘pipe room’. All I heard was water flowing into a bucket that was placed next to another. Fish were supposed to be in the big buckets but they had been taken out out this time. On a rack were tanks full of different creatures like crabs and fish that had been caught by the kids who went to the Harbor School.

I definitely want to remember how important oysters are for cleaning bodies of water because it is the main purpose of the Billion Oyster Project, and a whole other school that helps this organization.