Today Steven, Valentina, and I searched the field at Baywater (Thorndyke Bay, Hood Canal) to find our outplants from this past winter for the 10K seed project.

Overview

In this project we exposed oysters to 5 hardening treatments including elevated temperature, decreased salinity, combined temperature + salinity, immune stress (Poly I:C), and control. These treatments were conducted at Point Whitney in the fall of 2024 and were outplanted at Baywater Shellfish on October 31 2024.

We outplanted 30 total bags each with 150 oysters (n=6 bags per treatment). We also outplanted 3 temperature loggers (Hobo Tidbits) logging temperature every 15 min.

All information for this project can be found on our GitHub repo.

My previous notebook posts for this project can be found here.

All outplant data is available in the outplant folder here.

Today our goal was to locate the bags. We were told that the bags were missing or possibly moved over the winter.

Locating bags

We found all of the bags today! From what we can tell, the bags were still in their original location. We were able to find them by looking for the purple external cattle tags and by detecting the bluetooth temperature loggers.

The bags were all accounted for, although a few were on a broken line. I made a map included below of the location of all bags.

The bags were heavily overgrown with barnacles. When we come back to do our assessment we will count oysters for survival, take images for growth, and switch oysters to new bags. We will then outplant again in the same location (although on a new line to avoid the broken line).

Map of outplants

Here is a map of the bags from our search.

Assessment

There is a good series of morning low tides next week, so we will come back to pull the bags from the lines, count oysters for survival, image for growth, download loggers, and switch oysters to new bags.

Temperature loggers

I downloaded all loggers. I’ll check the batteries next week when we come back to assess.

Here are the temperatures from the loggers.