Visiting the Oyster Restoration site at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography campus

On August 10th, 2010 the research methods class visited the oyster restoration site located on the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography campus. The site was recently restored with pallets of oyster material in April and July of 2010 and is being monitored for the amount of sediment that accumulates over time. Four areas labeled (1, 2, 3, and control) within the site were designated and markers were placed at three different locations off of the beach. These three transects were located near the water, near the shoreline, and in between.

Our job was to measure the length of the markers at that specific time in all areas to determine if sediment is accumulating or eroding from the shore-line and using the measurements of previous months we can determine the sedimentation rate of the shore-line with or without the addition of the oysters. We also took 2 sediment core samples for each transect at the site so that we can examine the grain size distribution and the types of macroinvertebrate infauna that will be done at a later data. We placed all of our samples in Ziploc bags and when we arrived at the laboratory on campus we quickly placed our sediment samples in the freezer to preserve them and our macroinvertebrate samples in a mixture of formalin and rose Bengal in order to stain and preserve the living organisms that we want to identify.

The sedimentation rate for the land had the highest average at 0.53 ± 0.03 cm/day while the control site on land was at 0.02 cm/day (Table 1). The sedimentation rate for the middle area averaged 0.48 ± 0.36 cm/day while the control site had zero sedimentation during the 64 day period. The site closest to the water had the lowest sedimentation rate of 0.21 ± 0.32 cm/day while the control site had eroded at a rate of -0.04 cm/day. It is apparent that the sedimentation rate of the restored site is increasing compared to the control.

Table1: This table represents the sementation rates from July 19, 2010 to August 22, 2010 in three distinct areas of the site. The control site sedimentation rate is represented in red.



This is a photo taken of the oyster restoration site.

These are the markers that we used to measure the depth of sediment.

The sediment tubes that were used to captured the sediment near the depth markers.

The red liquid used was rose Bengal to preserve our sediment samples in the laboratory.