Starting a new round of seed hardening at Point Whitney
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Overview
Today I went out to Point Whitney to start thermal hardening treatments on our new batch of seed that we plan to outplant at Westcott in July. This post details my methods for today.
Thermal hardening
Last week Steven purchased seed from Jamestown Seafood, split them into two groups in two separate seed bags that are being held at Point Whitney hatchery in upwellers. We are going to conduct thermal hardening for 30 min each week for ~6 weeks prior to outplanting at Westcott.
I used the following approach to conduct the stress:
- Filled two 5-gallon buckets with seawater (one control, one high)
- In the control bucket I added a small recirculating pump
- In the high bucket I added a small recirculating pump and a small titanium heater connected to a thermostat
- I set the thermostat at 25°C and waited until the bucket read at 25°C to add the oysters
- I then added the control bag into the control bucket and the heat bag into the heated bucket
- I recorded the temperature and then started a timer for 30 min
- After 30 minutes I removed the oysters and rinsed all the equipment
Here is what the equipment looked like:
Control bucket 
High bucket 
All of the equipment is stored together on top of a yellow lid box in the attic. We will work on cleaning out the attic in the next month or so.
Size images
I then took images for size of a subset of each group.
Oysters were then returned to their ambient temperature holding tanks.
