This post details preparations for oyster sampling for Lifestage Carryover project.

Overview

Today I went to Point Whitney to clean, organize, and measure growth and survival of oysters in the lifestage carryover project. See previous posts on this project in my notebook here and Eric’s notebook here.

The GitHub repository for this project is here.

Tasks

Launch temperature loggers

I launched the two Pendant loggers programmed to delay start at 14:00 on Feb 26th logging every 5 min.

Loggers were put in the following tanks around 15:00.

• 20174087 (left, warm tank)
• 20174083 (right, ambient tank)

Clean tank area and gather supplies for sampling on Wednesday

I cleaned the tank area, organized supplies, and moved things upstairs that we weren’t using. We will need to do a full clean and organize of the upstairs area and take inventory.

I put supplies that we may want to use in the far left tank. This includes buckets, bench paper, tripours, logger supplies, and sampling materials.

I also brought down and rinsed more of the holding containers that we may want to use for heat exposure. These do not allow for water exchange so that our replicates can be treated as independent.

Clean tanks and measure growth and survival

I then cleaned all oysters and oyster canisters/bags. I took size measurements for all individuals and took a picture of a sample from the small spat cultures. I also recorded the total number of animals so that I can plan sampling (more on that tomorrow).

I only found 1 animal with mortality (treated juvenile).

Start heaters in heated tank and reallocate all oysters to ambient tank

After cleaning and measuring I then moved all of the oysters into the right tank at ambient temperature. All containers now have a unique label (electrical tap) with the lifestage, which tank it came from (right or left), and replicate identifier (e.g., “Left-Juvenile-H1” or “Right-Spat-1”).

After moving all the oysters to the right ambient tank, I added three 800W heaters with Finnex thermostat controllers to the left heated tank and set them to 28°C. However, there was not enough power for all of them, so I reduced it down to 2. I set the heaters around 15:30 and by about 16:30 it was raised from 14°C to 18°C. We can bump this up to 32°C the morning of sampling. We can try to add another heater if needed by finding another power source.