Monday 7-20-15

This was the day I finally felt like I had things under control (only took 6 weeks!). The system of screening out the 160 tanks, then screening out the New tanks and transferring the 160s over to the 160 tank seems to work well and my counting has gotten faster.

Larval tank counts

• NF_Tank2_160 (224,100)
• NF_Tank1_new (100)
• NF_Tank1_new (160) -> NF_Tank2_160
• HC_Tank2_160 (224,100)
• HC_Tank1_new (100)
• HC_Tank1_new (160) -> HC_Tank2_160
• SS_Tank2_160 (224,100)
• SS_Tank1_new (100)
• SS_Tank1_new (160) -> SS_Tank2_160

New larvae

• Some: SS2,SS3,HC5,HC3,HC1,SS1
• Lots: NF2,NF5

Growth

Took the last samples from the 2nd growth experiment today and fixed them in 80% ethanol.

Tuesday 7/21/15

Salinity

Looking at the samples taken Friday 7/17/15, there was a lot of white precipitate in many of the wells and it was a little more difficult to distinguish between live and dead. Ryann and I decided that larvae with any color were alive and those that were completely clear were dead. We also took new samples from each of the silos to count that day and avoid a similar complication. I’m still waiting on some of the data for Ryann, but the link to the datasheet is below. It seems that they all pretty much died at 6 ppt, but above that mortality is variable. The goal was to get at least 100 larvae per sample when counting but that wasn’t met for most of them.

Salinity counts datasheet

New larvae

• Some: SS, HC
• Lots: NF

Wednesday 7-22-15

Larval tank counts

• NF_Tank2_160 (100)
• NF_Tank1_new (100)
• NF_Tank1_new (160) -> NF_Tank2_160
• HC_Tank2_160 (224,100)
• HC_Tank1_new (100)
• HC_Tank1_new (160) -> HC_Tank2_160
• SS_Tank2_160 (224,100)
• SS_Tank1_new (100)
• SS_Tank1_new (160) -> SS_Tank2_160

Salinity

Ryann cleaned up the salinity experiment.

New larvae

Some: HC5

Screened out all of the buckets but got no larvae for NF or SS. With so few larvae, I decided to go ahead and collapse my 15 bucket system down to 3. All families in a population are now in the same bucket, but still in their separate bags. This will considerably reduce cleaning time, and although it will change the genetic makeup of the offspring there should be about a 2 week lag given the length of brooding time.

Larval counts datasheet