Volunteers Needed to Help Relocate Baby Oysters in Delaware Bay

COURT HOUSE – New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium, Rutgers University and the American Littoral Society need volunteers, Sept. 14 at 7 a.m., to relocate baby oysters, or spats, from the mud flats at Rutgers Cape Shore Laboratory, 299 S. Delsea Dr., Cape May Court House, N.J., where they are incubating to a barge that will sail the infant filter feeders to their permanent home in the Delaware Bay.
Project PORTS – Promoting Oyster Restoration Through Schools – is an education and community-based oyster restoration program led by Rutgers University that helps revitalize Delaware Bay oyster populations and the important fish habitat their reefs provide. The oyster is a keystone species in the bay that improves water quality, and provides food and habitat to countless organisms.
For the 8th straight year, students throughout South Jersey made shell-filled mesh bags as part of Project PORTS. The shell bags served as a settlement surface for the spats when the bay’s oyster population spawned this summer. Now it is time to transplant the spat-on-shell to a restoration site in the bay.
For more about Project PORTS, click here.