Launching experiment at Manchester and maintaining stocks at Point Whitney
This post details launching a new experiment at the Manchester NOAA station and conducting maintenance of stocks at the Point Whitney hatchery.
GitHub repositories
Data for these projects are stored on GitHub in the following locations:
Point Whitney
Cleaning and general maintenance
I cleaned and checked on our oysters at Point Whitney.
- Lagoon dock: Includes bags of excess PolyIC seed and excess 10K seed. All bags were cleaned with fresh water.
- Indoor upwellers: Contains PolyIC seed. Seed and upwellers were cleaned with fresh water.
- Trays: Contains USDA families and PolyIC seed. All trays were sprayed and cleaned with fresh water.
PolyIC size images
During cleaning, I took images of PolyIC seed images for growth measurements. Here is an example image.
Temperature loggers
I downloaded loggers from our current locations at Point Whitney.
Lagoon dock (excess 10K seed and PolyIC seed)
PolyIC seed upweller tanks (indoors)
Tanks and trays
Note that the trays are the only current effort - therefore temperatures are only current for this group. The trays contain the USDA families and the PolyIC seed.
Notebook images
I also took images of the last notebook entry at Point Whitney (that I forgot to do last time).
Manchester
We started a new experiment at Manchester today! This is being conducted in collaboration with Mackenzie Gavery (NOAA).
Overview
In this project, we are conducting a 2-week thermal hardening of seed provided by the USDA ARS POGS program. These oysters were shipped on May 29-30, 2025 under a WDFW permit.
Oysters will be exposed to the following conditions:
- Control: Ambient temperatures (approx. 14-16°C)
- Treated: Daily exposure to elevated 25°C temperatures for approx. 5 hours
After 2-3 weeks of these treatments, oysters will be outplanted at Manchester on the docks in SEPA cages to assess survival and growth over the summer.
Here are the activities we performed at the start of the experiment on May 30, 2025.
General set up and water conditions
Mac prepared the system for our experiment.
- We will use four white 200 L tanks.
- Two tanks will be under each of two headers with one tank per treatment per header.
- We will use two treatments as listed above (n=2 tanks at High and 2 at control conditions).
- The systems have been cleaned and sterilized prior to our use.
- Chillers will keep the water at control conditions and heaters will be used to control temperature (see below).
- Each tank has a 100GPM recirculating pump and an airstone.
- Each tank has a PCV rack from which we will hang the bags of oysters.
- Each tank is dosed with food from a feeding header.
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- Flow set to 55 mL / 15 sec in all tanks.
- 5 um filtered seawater that is UV treated.
- Diatom mix food source delivered into each of the two water lines with a peristaltic pump.
Oysters:
- We received oysters from the USDA POGS program today.
- We received between 40-150 oysters from each of 10 families (see below).
- Oysters will be evenly divided between the four replicate tanks, resulting in half of the oysters from each family at High and half at Control conditions.
- Oysters will be kept separate in mesh bags and hung from PVC racks into each tank.
The tanks were assigned to the following treatments:
- Tank 1 (High)
- Tank 2 (High)
- Tank 3 (Control)
- Tank 4 (Control)
Temperature control
To generate the temperature treatments, I set up the following equipment for each tank in the High temperature treatment. The Control tanks do not have any heating equipment.
- One two-outlet digital outlet timer plugged into the main power source
- Two Helio thermostat controllers plugged into the outlet timer
- One 800W titanium Finnex heater plugged into each Helio controller with one heater placed in Tanks 1 and 2 (High temperature). Control tanks (Tanks 3 and 4) do not have heaters.
- Helio controllers have temperature probe that was placed in each respective tank.
- Controllers were set to 77°F/25°C such that when the controllers are powered on, they will heat each tank to 25°C and maintain the temperature.
- Outlet timers were programmed to turn on at 10:00pm each night and turn off at 4:00am each morning, leading to a 6h heating window.
- When timers turn the controllers off, temperatures will return to control conditions.
We tested out the heating system and it was able to heat sufficiently.
Oyster preparations
We used the following steps to prepare oysters for the experiment:
- Unpacked the oysters containing 10 individual families
- Count the number of oysters in each family (ranged from 40-150)
- Divide the family evenly by 4 (to evenly represent each family in each of our 4 tanks). This ranged from ~15 per family to ~40 per family in each tank.
- Assign each group of oysters an individual green tag number and take an image with a scale bar of each group
- Put the oysters in green mesh bags with the tag attached to be tied to the PVC rack in each tank.
- Each tank contains 10 mesh bags (1 bag per family per tank).
Experimental set up
Oysters were added to the system at 3:15pm. Here are some images of the system up and running! See the link at the top of this post to the GitHub repository with all of the data and metadata.
Temperature loggers
I set up Hobo TidBit MX400 temperature loggers in each tank.
- Logger 22105353: Tank 3 (Control)
- Logger 22105354: Tank 1 (High)
- Logger 22105356: Tank 4 (Control)
- Logger 22105358: Tank 2 (High)
Loggers will log temperature (°C) every 10 minutes throughout the experiment.
Schedule of activities
- Thursday June 4: Mac will check on the tanks and do any cleaning/maintenance required
- Wednesday June 11: Ariana will check on tanks and download loggers
- Monday June 16: Outplant at Manchester docks
- August - September: Monthly survival and growth assessments
June 2 2025 - checking temperature loggers
I went to Manchester to download the loggers on June 2 2025 to make sure the temperature exposure was working correctly. Everything looks great! The temperatures reach the target and return to control conditions just as its time for another exposure.
