Marine Studies
Marine Studies Enrichment Program
Several sessions of this intensive 5-day residential program are held from June through August each summer at Camp DeWolfe on Long Island's east end. Selected high school students are immersed from morning until night in study of the marine environment. Students learn about physical and chemical oceanography, marine ecology, invertebrate zoology, mariculture, wetlands conservation, and man's impact on the marine environment through a variety of field and lab activities. Guest lecturers add another dimension to each session.
Farming the Sea:
A Hard-Shelled Clam Mariculture Project
The coastal waters of Long Island had been noted for their production of hard-shelled clams (Mercenaria mercenaria), New York's most important shellfish. The harvesting and marketing of this clam species had developed into a multi-million dollar a year industry. Unfortunately, this irreplaceable natural and economic resource has been threatened in recent years by a combination of man-made and environmental conditions. At stake are the losses of not only a vital component of the estuarine ecosystem, but an important food source, employment opportunities, and a recreational pastime. Fishery managers have suggested mariculture shellfish farming projects as one way to help preserve the hard-shelled clam industry.
High school students participating in the BOCES mariculture project meet mostly during after-school hours to learn about clam anatomy, physiology and embryology, the history of the shellfish industry, how clams are harvested, marketed, and researched, and the problems affecting baymen in New York's coastal waters. After this orientation to shellfish, the students begin their mariculture experience by constructing 3 foot x 12 foot-long culture rafts. Each raft contains screened-in compartments that float just below the surface of the water, layered with sand. The students then place thousands of hatchery-raised, six millimeter sized seed clams into the rafts in late May. These clams (Mercenaria mercenaria notata) have a reddish zigzag pattern genetically marked on their shells which distinguishes them from the common hard-shelled clam found naturally.
Each week, from May through September, the students, working in small groups, visit the floating rafts by boat. They perform the routine maintenance of removing fouling organisms, measure the size of randomly selected clams from each raft to determine growth rates, and take temperature and salinity measurements. By late September, the clams average twenty to twenty-five millimeters in shell length, a size suitable for seeding into the bay bottom. On the final workday, the students remove the clams from their rafts, take measurements, and cast them onto the bay bottom as their boat crosses Stony Brook Harbor in Smithtown and Mount Sinai Harbor in Brookhaven. Many of the clams are expected to survive and grow to legal size within 4-5 years, and hopefully their spawning activity will further contribute to the future populations in both harbors. This past year, student participants from the Hauppauge and Kings Park High Schools successfully cultured over 135,000 hard-shelled clams, helping to restock our coastal waters.
For more information please contact Outdoor Education Specialist Dan Stenzler at 631-360-3652 or dstenzle@wsboces.org.