Today we talked with Neil Thompson at USDA to plan seed transfers for 2025.

Goals

Our goal for the WSG project is to stress harden multiple families with varying OsHV-1 resilience and outplant to the field. We would like to conduct hardening trials in spring 2025 and outplant early summer 2025 with monitoring thorough fall 2025.

Plans

Plan A

Our first and most likely option for receiving seed from the USDA is to ship approx. 200 oysters per family (they have 80 families - we wont use that many!) in late March-early April 2025.

There will be testing and field data from these families, so conducting hardening would be a nice complement to existing data.

To do this, we will need to arrange for health testing and shipment permitting.

Plan B

If they conduct a spawn in early 2025 (condition Feb-March, spawn April), we could receive seed <5mm by June-July 2025.

We may proceed with both plan A and B depending on how things go.

Next steps

We will all touch base in a few weeks to finalize shipment plans.

We may also send them some of our unused HUDLs.