Tuesday May 13, 2014

Today was a good day.

I still haven't quite gotten over my stomach bug from yesterday, but fortunately I feel much better.  Because I did not eat yesterday, due to the bug, I was starving.  However, I still felt too sick to eat, so I was having a huge internal struggle with weather or not to kick the bucket and do it.

Aside from my bug struggle, today was very important because it was the last day I did water quality.  I decided today would be my last day, for a variety of reasons.  The first being the temperature of the water on the surface.  It was a whopping 65.7 degrees, which means that there is definitely going to be considerable growth through out the week.  The other reason I decided to stop was that I was feeling crunched for time with my project.

So, since today was my last day, I decided to do a recap on my findings.  At the beginning of the project, the water quality sampling was going to go towards my research, but as my project evolved, it has changed in its function.  Now water quality tests are more to answer a question I was curious about.

Will there actually be growth throughout the oyster growing season (April-November)?  I had been wondering, since most people say that the oyster season is from April to November, but people also say that algae doesn't grow enough before June to have any significant growth.  While of course this does depend on the weather patterns of the year, I was still curious, because a two month difference in growing periods really affects the total sales of a farm.

I am not sure that my results were completely accurate, because the weather this spring has been fluctuating a lot.  However, I believe that I can conclusively say that the growing season for oysters runs more mid-May-November than it does April-November.  From my results, I noticed that the majority of the growth occurred over the last two weeks of the project (weeks 6 and 7).  This correlated with the more constant warm weather and lack of wind in early May.  Something I found interesting about my results is that for the last two weeks my cell densities were much lower than I expected them to be.  At first I was quite worried, but then I realized that they were probably much lower than before, because they oysters were filtering the algae out of the water and using it to grow.