WSG USDA Hatchery Day - Assessing lifestage carry over project
Hatchery day at Point Whitney for the USDA & WSG projects.
Overview
Today we visited the Point Whitney hatchery in Brinnon, WA to check on the status of the C. gigas lifestage carry over experiment.
The experiment is detailed in Eric’s notebook. Overall, Eric conducted a project in which four lifestages (three seed/juvenile classes and adults) were exposed to a conditioning/chronic stress event where temperatures were increased to 25°C daily over a period of 6 weeks. After this, an acute stress was run where individuals were exposed to 30°C. There are controls for conditioning period and acute period held at ambient temperature with reciprocal exposure design. Since the exposures (Nov 2024) oysters have been held at ambient conditions. After the first actue exposure, Eric collected samples from a subset of oysters (gill and mantle for each sampled animal) for RNA and DNA (300 total samples; 7-9 replicates per treatment group x lifestage). Adults were from four families with members of each family in each treatment. Seed were from large batches produced by the hatchery with no known family information. Adults may be diploid and triploid and we will need to assess this with genetics.
The GitHub repository for this project is here.
In my next post I will detail some thoughts on experimental design.
Tasks
Today, we cleaned tanks, assessed survival, and measured max. length of all oysters. We also talked about needs for equipment and tank construction and discussed possible experimental design for next steps (detailed in my next post).
- Cleaned tanks: We removed oysters from tanks, rinsed all oysters and containers with fresh water, and wiped and refilled large water baths.
Here are some pictures of the tanks. The tank on the left held the treatment oysters and the tank on the right held the control oysters.
- Measured length: We measured lengths of all the oysters in tanks. For the smallest seed we took a picture with a scale (ruler on our notebook) for image analysis. Here are the images and pictures of the measurements.
Treatment seed:
Control seed:
Notebook:
