Wednesday 2016-09-07

In the morning, Natalie and I went to the Taylor Shellfish hatchery to pick up valves for the broodstock OA system. We got to Manchester around 12:30pm and worked on finishing up the plumbing and gluing the PVC. The hoses that were intended to be used to deliver water to the tubs didn’t fit easily on the valves, so we stuck one end in a toaster oven for a minute to make it easier to push on. We hooked up the manifolds to the OA system and let water run through overnight. Then we realized we hadn’t added in coupling for the algae injection port (D’oh!), so that needed to be addressed on Thursday.  We didn’t have time to give algae to the oysters or scallops, so both animals ended up without food overnight.

Oyster Mortalities

• CA1T (1), BC1T (1), BC2T_058

Need to do: get brand name of valves

Thursday 2016-09-08

• Used the rest of the white shellfish tags to label oysters that will be used in the adult OA experiment
  • Weighed oysters before adding tag and recorded their tray group during the larval experiment
  • Placed them in a single layer on the bottom of flow-through buckets with seawater and live algae overnight for putty to cure

• Checked for mortalities
  • 2 from OR1T (sampled 1)
  • 1 from OR2T (sampled)
• Figured out the flow and food concentration with Ryan for the scallop tanks
  • Goal is to have at least 100,000 cells per mL of algae
  • Found that when valves are set to 50 the flow into each tub was ~0.85 L/min
  • Added couplings for the algae injection port on the flex hoses leading up to the manifolds
• Starting around 5pm, took the scallops out of their fish totes and divided them up evenly amongst the 8 treatment tubs, with 11 or 12 scallops per tub. There were 4 fish totes corresponding to the 4 source populations.
  • Scuzz and some soft tissue epiphytes were gently wiped off with gloved hands. Scallops placed so they would not be touching each other
  • Temp of tubs: 15.12degC – 15.37degC, Salinity: 28.6
  • Tote A2 scallops spawned
    • Looked like eggs from 380, 311, 48, 381
  • Tote B2 spawned
    • just eggs from 312

Friday 2016-09-09

• Checked for mortalities
  • BC 049
• Divided up oysters and placed them into clam bags to hang in treatment tubs with scallops.
  • 12 British Columbia oysters per treatment tub
  • 10 California and 10 Oregon oysters per treatment tub

• Dissected adductor muscle from extra BC oysters not used in OA experiment
  • Recorded weight, reproductive status, tray group, and took pics for size
  • BC1T A, B, 93, C, D, 101
  • BC2T A, 111, 110, B, C, D, E, 108
• Checked algae in one A tub and 1 B tub using Coulter counter
  • 92,921 cells/ml, 99,070 cells/ml

Sunday 2016-09-11

• Recorded which oysters were in which experiment tub and made sure numbers were balanced, in case an oyster gets misplaced when cleaning
• Checked for mortalities
  • 024W (CA)
  • 058W
• Weighed and took pictures for size of any oysters I did not already have data for
• Dissected adductor muscle into RNALater from 12 oysters that were in tray OR1T during larval experiment
  • Labelled OR1T A-L
• Processed the rest of the tiles from the acidification larval experiment
  • These are 4.5in diameter PVC tiles that were roughed up on both sides with sandpaper and placed with oyster larvae 14 days post-release
    • Only added if at least 20% survival in treatment
  • To process them I counted the number of live and dead oysters per tile, took a pic of both sides with a ruler, and scraped off juveniles into RNALater if there were at least 5 living oysters on the tile