The Duke Aquafarm was established in 2018 as a demonstration site for shellfish aquaculture. The overall objective was to expose students to oyster aquaculture by providing immersive experiences in the marine environment where they work to produce food they can enjoy themselves. The Duke Aquafarm is a 0.6-acre farm in Tar Bay (Atlantic Beach, NC) nestled in the salt marshes adjacent to Fort Macon on the Beaufort Inlet. The farm is a grow-out site consisting of approximately 200 floating bags. Labor for the farm is based on student volunteers. Students sign up for weekly workdays (or rather “fun-days”) where they take a short boat ride from the Duke University Marine Lab (DUML) to Tar Bay, get in the water to work on the farm for a couple of hours, and then take a short boat ride back to DUML. Most of the work is not strenuous and includes weekly flipping of the bags, cleaning and repairing gear, and splitting oysters into multiple bags when the bags become too heavy.
Since its establishment, the research and educational value of the Duke Aquafarm has expanded to support many courses as well as student research projects. For example, the Biodiversity of Marine Invertebrates course routinely collects invertebrates from the farm for their labs, and the Aquaculture and the Environment course takes field trips to the farm every semester. Student research projects conducted using the Duke Aquafarm include analyzing microplastics at the farm, evaluating the fate of ingested microplastic particles, monitoring spat recruitment, population genomics of wild oysters, developing sensors to monitor oyster gaping, and environmental monitoring (temperature, salinity, DO, pH, and depth). Future research projects supported by the Duke Aquafarm include continued environmental monitoring with a goal of understanding potential stressors, performance of genetic lines under these environmental stressors, genetic/genomic analyses of local wild oysters, and hatchery production of oysters for both the farm and lab/field-based experiments.
Student response to the Duke Aquafarm has been overwhelmingly positive with hundreds of students visiting the farm every year since its inception. The farm has also served as a source of community building for the university at large, providing student-grown oysters to many oyster roasts on the DUML campus. This engagement has extended beyond Duke as well, with an increasing number of public groups (e.g., local Boys & Girls Clubs, Scouting America) having visited and learned about the operational and research activities of the Duke Aquafarm.