Today we finish the job of depositing 60 tonnes of mussels / kūtai into Ōkahu Bay. Over the past two weeks our friends at NIML/Sanford have made three trips across from the Eastern Firth of Thames, bringing 20 tonnes of kūtai on each trip.

The kūtai have been deposited across 6 different beds, three on shell and three on sediment, in a scaled-up experiment that aims to understand whether shell substrate makes a big difference to survival and recruitment of new kūtai. This work will inform our approach for restoration at scale.