2025 and 2026 have been full of hatchery tours, shucking, cooking & touch tank biology lessons for all ages! Thank you to all of our collaborators!

Aquaculture Literacy Activity Guide

Click on the image below to download a printable PDF. Activity guide was funded by a NOAA eeBLUE Aquaculture Literacy mini-grant.

Click on photo below for access to our “Remember When” video interviews.

Each short film features a founding member of the MV Shellfish Group and discusses the Island’s reverence for shellfish, the challenges we’ve faced in the past and our future challenge to preserve the Island’s shellfish legacy. These films were produced by Circuit Arts and funded by a NOAA eeBLUE Aquaculture Literacy mini-grant.

Extra curricular

The ‘26-’27 school year is here and the WT School Club, BioKids for 1st & 2nd graders is going to explore coastal habitat and marine life.

Our 4H club, Seashore Explorers, will begin again in October. Last year, explorers went to Tisbury Great Pond, Lagoon Pond, Moshup Beach, Menemsha and Brush Pond to learn about differences in coastal habitat and history. Their culminating project was a map of those outings made out of juvenile bivalve shells. 

The aim of our regular clubs and hatchery tours is to inspire young scientists with simple experiments, expose them to local marine life, and teach them how to be better stewards of our marine environments.

Classroom visits & shoreside tours

MVSG continues to work with schools, libraries, camps, and other organizations. If you are interested in a classroom visit or a fieldtrip to one of our hatcheries, please reach out to our Education Manager.

In 2025, we reached nearly 1,100 students Pre K- Grade 12 to host demonstrations and share facts about water quality, shellfish benefits, salt marsh ecosystems, and the world of science.

After a 20 year hiatus, we started hosting school groups at the John T. Hughes Research Station to build shoreside aquariums, peek inside our greenhouse hatchery & walk the Brush Pond Marsh with our Marine Biologists. Each year we are adding new stations like an accessible touch tank and activity center in 2025.

This year’s clubs and educational activities are being partially funded by a grant from the Slough Farm Foundation to increase accessibility at our industrial hatchery sites. By collaborating with other organizations like the Ag Society, Blue Dot Institute, Felix Neck, IGI, LPA, Penikese Girl’s Science Camp, SailMV, and the Trustee’s The Farm Institute,WT & OB Public Libraries, we are able bring more youth into our spaces to view hatchery operations. For those who cannot come to us, we bring science, touch tanks, shucking, and harvesting lessons off-site. 

How to Lessons - ALl ages!

2025 and 2026 are loaded with collaborative partnerships. MVSG has continued to evolve programming centered around the bivalve as a climate-resilient, local food source. We work with individuals, other conservation organizations, community members & libraries to teach people how to shuck, how to cook, and how to harvest local shellfish. Set up a lesson with us and learn why we work so hard to “bivalvify” the waters around Martha’s Vineyard.

2024-2025 outreach was supported with funding from NOAA’s eeBLUE Aquaculture Literacy Program with a focus on inspiring locals and visitors to get out onto the ponds, explore to the benefits of aquaculture, and participate in volunteer science opportunities. Over the course of 62 recurring programs, lessons and larger events, we engaged 2,659 people of all ages about the many facets of aquaculture — public and private, hatchery and field-based. Occurring on the eve of our 50th year, this grant also enabled MVSG to make a number of documentary-style shorts capturing our impact on and around Martha’s Vineyard. They will be available from our website and at programs in the near future.