This post details activities from the field at Point Whitney for our oyster work.

Point Whitney

To-do list for today

• Thin and shuffle USDA seed in heath trays
• Allocate PolyIC seed to heath trays
• Sample PolyIC seed for RNA/DNA and growth
• Transport PolyIC seed, USDA seed, and extra broodstock to UW
• Inventory current stocks

I forgot to take pictures of the notebook… So I’ll come back and add details and update bag tag inventory next time I go out.

USDA seed

We took a sample of the USDA seed from the five families in heath trays to transport back to UW.

These will be used to examine family variation in resazurin responses.

This thinned the heath tray stocks so that they have more room for growth. I’ll thin them again if needed next time.

We shuffled the order of heath stack trays randomly.

10K seed

The 10K seed bags look good. We have bags hanging at the docks with a temperature logger. We did not change or move any of the 10K seed.

Broodstock

We took extra broodstock oysters left from Kathleen’s projects (bags UWSR17, 2, and 31) that were in the large 10 holer tanks.

We left the USDA family broodstock in the tanks for later use.

PolyIC seed

I sampled n=10 tubes of n=5-7 seed with 500 µL of RNA/DNA shield. These are tubes 121-160. Samples were frozen over night and transported to UW the next day and stored at -80°C. When sampling, I added the oysters into the shield and then crushed them with forceps.

I then took images of oysters from the treatments for size. Those images are on GitHub here.

We also moved one tripour full of seed of each treatment to a red seed bag (n=1 per treatment) and added them to the 10K bag lagoon hanging structure.

Then, 100 mL of seed of each treatment tank were moved into heath trays, with n=2 trays per treatment tank. This totalled 8 health trays with PolyIC seed. This resulted in n=4 trays per treatment with duplicate trays per treatment tank. We will monitor these for growth with the goal to outplant these oysters in the spring to test field performance.

I moved the temperature logger from the USDA heath stack trays into one of the PolyIC trays to monitor temperature.

The remaining PolyIC seed were then combined into one large silo per treatment inside for extra holding.

Download loggers

I downloaded all temperature loggers. I uploaded them to GitHub for the PolyIC project, the 10K seed project and the hardening projects.

To do next time

• Take a picture of the notebook from today’s work
• Take images for PolyIC growth from silos and from heath trays
• Thin health trays if needed
• Update bag tag inventory metadata

UW FTR

To-do list at UW

• Move oysters into tanks at FTR
• Clean tank room
• Water change and feeding

We moved all of the broodstock and seed into tanks at FTR and cleaned and reorganized the room.

Here is the updated list of what is in the FTR tanks.

• Left Tank
  • Bulk seed (for Genevieve’s project) in a yellow bin
  • Genevieve’s used oysters bags x 2
  • Old PolyIC seed in silos x 2
  • New PolyIC seed in black mesh bags x 2 (for use in next round of experiments)
• Right Tank
  • Old PolyIC seed in silos x 2
  • New PolyIC seed in black mesh bags x 2 (for use in next round of experiments)
  • Broodstock trays (for Emma’s project)
  • USDA seed in red seed bags x 5

Left tank:

Right tank:

Finally, I added food and did a water change. Salinity is at 24-25 ppt.