On Sunday 11/1/15 I took an early flight out to Seattle for a week of torturing oysters. My goals for the week were to take pictures for size of my juvenile F2 oysters and do an experiment to test for differences in resilience to cold temperature shock.
Over the summer I set juvenile Olympia oysters on PVC tiles and hung them off the dock by the Manchester Research Station at the end of the summer. Unfortunately, one of my stacks of trays fell off the dock a few days after during a crazy storm. They sat on the bottom for a couple of days and then were rescued by a crew that left them sitting on the dock in the hot afternoon sun. Once the hatchery crew realized where they were they quickly put them in a tank, but the stack may have been out of water for a few hours. They were redeployed on 9/10/15 with safety line and haven’t had an issue since.
On 10/14/15 two of the PSRF hatchery crew, Stuart and Laura, pulled up the trays and photographed the tile to get size information. There was a lot of mortality on the stack that had been out of the water, but the other stack had good survival.
Picture taken on 10/14/15 of a tile with Hood Canal juvenile oysters.
Today I pulled up the trays and took pictures of the tiles. It’s exciting to see how much they had grown, even in just 3 weeks!
Picture of Hood Canal oysters taken 11/3/15
I left the oyster tiles in a large, static tank at ambient temperature and splashed in some live algae. Alice and I also checked on some F2 oysters that were set on cultch at the end of the summer. These were basically leftover larvae after I had enough in my tanks with tiles. As larval production was really ramped down at the end of the summer, I suspect that these are from only a few individuals per population. To get a rough estimate of how many there were per population, I measured out 50 mL of oysters, counted them, and then measured the total volume of oysters.
- Fidalgo Bay (NF): 215 oysters/50 mL in 450 mL total = 1935 total
- Oyster Bay (SS): 254/50mL in 250mL total = 1270
- Hood Canal (HC): 208/50 mL in 325mL total = 1352
At 9:30am we turned on a chiller in one of the outdoor setting tanks and set it to 0degC. I monitored it throughout the day to see how long it took to get to 0.
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Time
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Degrees C
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9:30AM
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13
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11:00AM
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8
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12:00PM
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6
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1:15PM
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3
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2:30PM
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0.5
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3:00PM
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0 (turned chiller off)
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Getting My Genes Wet 