~ A collaboration between Australian Diving Instructions and Victorian National Parks Association ~

This is an ongoing project between July - December 2019, involving building, deploying, monitoring and collecting data collection plates for monitoring oyster and mussels settlement.

Oyster and mussel reefs once covered vast areas of the seabed in Port Phillip Bay, and were an important food source for local Indigenous people. However, the reefs were decimated by European settlement and the dredging that came with it.

Patchy groups of oysters and mussels are still found in Port Phillip Bay, and the good news is that trials to restore the reefs are currently underway in two locations.

To help identify other suitable sites for reef restoration, ReefWatch is trialling the use of settlement plates with the help of its ReefWatchers.

Settlement plates can be anything in the water that larvae in the water column can settle on and survive. In our case, we are trialling small ‘plates’ of PVC.

With settlement plates spread throughout the bay, we hope to find ‘hot spots’ where large numbers of mussel and oyster larvae settle on them and survive. The ‘hot spots’ could then become sites for the re-establishment of the reefs.