Assessing oyster growth at Goose Point
Overview
Today we visited the Goose Point Oysters Palix River site to assess growth and survival and download temperature loggers from our 2024 outplants. These oysters will be left out for the summer (third summer of outplanting). This post details activities and outcomes from today.
Assessment
We did the following tasks today:
- Cleaned all cages and put oysters into new clean cages (there was a ton of barnacle growth!)
- Took images of oysters for growth analysis and counting live oysters
- Counted dead oysters and removed dead shells
- Removed mussels from cages (lots of mussel recruitment!)
- Cleaned tags and temperature loggers
- Downloaded temperature loggers
- Manually measured length, width, and depth of one cage of oysters (n=84) for updating growth models
The assessment went well with no major issues to note. We saw a lot of barnacle growth and mussel recruitment and the oysters are quite large. We will leave them out for the summer but note that we will need to either thin the oysters or shut down the experiment at the next time point due to limited room for more growth.
All temperature loggers were downloaded at 1045 and still had sufficient memory and battery for this next deployment.
Overall the oysters look good!
All data from today is on GitHub here.
Survival
We recorded 1-3 dead oysters in all cages. There was no major mortality. Mortality data has been updated here.
There is a moderately significant effect of treatment on cumulative mortality over the course of our 3 year deployment with higher mortality in primed oysters, particularly in those exposed to fresh water stress priming treatments in 2024.
Growth and individual measurements
We took images for growth that are stored on GitHub here.
This analysis is detailed in an Issue on GitHub.
We also took individual measurements of oysters with a caliper for length, width, and depth to update growth models for photo analyses.
Loggers
We downloaded loggers and I plotted the logger data for temperature over the course of our deployment.
I also sent this to the manager at Goose Point along with the raw data here.
Pictures
