We're standing in one of our living labs project sites in Wealthlet Harbor and you can see in a distance at the low tide it's exposing our project site where we are restoring oyster reef. It's a collaborative project between Wealthlet, Town of Wealthlet, Green Harvest project at Humas Boston and School Food Environment. It started as a master thesis of one of my students in 2006-2007 and it was actually assessing the shellfish aquaculture in commercially, you know, creationally harvested shellfish in Wealthlet Harbor and the project actually identified that there is a need for establishment of sanctuaries, shellfish sanctuaries throughout the Wealthlet Harbor so that we can restore not only the population of native oysters but also to improve the quality of the coastal habitats and try to understand the connection between oyster reefs, salt marshes and eel grass beds as three keystone habitats that used to thrive in Wealthlet Harbor and now they're a little bit degraded and disbalanced in comparison what we used to have here. The water quality in this specific little pocket here at the Marina and the Pier of the Wealthlet Harbor is a little bit more degraded than the rest. Wealthlet is actually famous for the Wealthlet oysters so the water quality is wonderful and it actually gives the special taste to oysters but here because of like almost like little appendix of accumulation of the sediment and also because this energy flow and water flow between the salt marsh that used to be connected with this water was actually closed with a culvert and the roads so the human structure cut those habitats apart and communication is not existing so all the organic materials were settling here creating a mock and a very muddy sediment that were totally unsuitable for oysters to settle. In order to improve the sediment and make it possible for oysters to settle we start culturing two acre propagation area with shells like clam shells which are very similar structure, cultic carbonate as the oyster shells. You can see here attached we have this amazing ability to attach themselves like cement themselves on a hard surface and that's what they love. They love hard surface that is very similar to the structure and quality of their own shells, cultic carbonate and you can see here from last year's oysters that settled on a couch which is natural clams that we use as a couch to place on a muddy area of our two acre propagation site where oysters could actually find their home otherwise if you can see here when it's exposed to mud this black muck it's almost an oxic sediment where basically the cult sinks into so if young oysters those are called spets that are trying to find suitable surface where they will attach themselves those are from this year spets just maybe a couple weeks old that actually settled on this shell but if they settle in the area that will be exposed to muck they will suffocate and die so you can see how creating such suitable areas for oysters to settle is very important to start creating natural oyster reefs and here you can see on a shell this year a couple of weeks old oysters spets and a year old oysters from last year and they're attaching on each other because that's what they love it's very important to understand why those beautiful species are not just like a wonderful food and seafood support for for us for humans they're an amazing and very important keystone species for our coastal habitat to improve not only the water quality but also to support coastal shorelines from erosion from storms to create engineering amazing 3D structures where different species can live