Friday May 2, 2014

 Today was a good day until it wasn't.

The majority of my day was fine. I did water quality and saw a significant rise in the water temperature which made me really happy. Because warmer water means growth for my oysters.

Later that day I did a weigh and measure of my oysters, with Will helping me. Having help was great, because I had someone to talk to and also because it was much faster. Usually it takes me around two hours to do a weigh and measure, since I have to count them all out, then weigh and measure them and write all the data down at the same time. Since I had help, it took less than an hour, which was really nice, because I had some time left over at the end of the day.

Of course, since I was having a nice day, the universe had to mess it up somehow. (Not that I'm bitter or anything.) So apparently I did not save my data. Either I closed the file without saving, or my computer died, or I accidentally manually deleted my data set, but somehow, it was not there. There are no words to describe my current frustration with myself and technology.

So, there really isn't much that I remember specifically, but there are a few things that I remember remarking upon. The first is that the oysters still had not shown very much growth lengthwise, but had put on some weight.  I recall being worried about their lack of growth lengthwise, because oysters must be 3 inches long to sell at market in MA.  Even though they were growing a nice belly, judging by their increase in weight (I don't think it was much, maybe half a gram.), which would mean a better quality oyster, I was taking a quality versus quantity sort of approach.  My though process was that I needed to strike a balance of having a well rounded oyster and also getting them to market size as soon as possible.  The second thing I noticed about the oysters was that they had begun to secrete their solid filled mucous poop.  I realize this sounds disgusting, but I was actually quite excited to see it.  this means that the oysters are filtering enough water to have waste and be getting rid of that waste pretty frequently.  (Although getting covered in "oyster poop" sounds really unappealing, I discovered that it is not so bad, since their poop is essentially just algae and mucus.)