On December 5th my group and the other water pollution group went back to visit Billion Oyster Project on Governors Island. This time we got a full tour of the oyster facilities and well as going to the Oyster restoration Stations. The tour was very cool because BOP is very much a school as it is an oyster lab. I was very cool learning about how how the New York Harbor School works with BOP all of the time and spend time learning about oysters and work on the water as part of their school day. Their facilities also had numerous live organisms that were caught straight from the river and we even saw their diving program which helps build and maintain the oyster reefs. I thought it was surprising that kids were at BOP for school, but then I realized that there is so much to learn there and so much hands on work that can be done so it is actually a great learning environment. The other thing we saw was their oyster restoration stations or ORS. There were eight ORS and we pulled them up from the dock and counted how many oysters were alive. There was also a ton of non oyster organisms as well. We saw numerous crabs fish, and even shrimp, as well as a few organisms that we did not know what they were. I was impacted in a shocked way because I had never seen so many organisms that lived in the river. The oysters are great at naturally filtering water and are good at preventing long term water pollution. I definitely want to talk about this at the Teach In because it was crazy how many organisms that were there that I did not even know of.
