Friday April 18, 2014

Today was a pretty average day.  I took my cell count first thing this morning and it was really cold.  However, it was nice, because the dock wasn't wet, so I didn't get dirty when I shook my oysters.  Water quality was a struggle today.  My eyes were really red and itchy from being so tired (I didn’t sleep very well.) and my allergies have just started to flare up.  So, rather than counting all the cells on the hemocytometer, I counted the first 5 cells on each and multiplied them by 5.  Which means that the count is more of an estimate.  However, given the amount of algae in the harbor, I might be counting the cells this way from now on.

Today I also had my second weigh and measure.  The first thing I did was count the oysters and look for deaths.  From my 400 oysters, there was only one death.  (Something I found strange.  I thought I had 500 oysters, but when I went through and counted them all this week I only had 400.  I am honestly not sure what happened.)  I cleaned then examined the dead oyster’s shell.  (I will post pictures soon.)  There two places in the shell that looked as though the shell had been damaged.  When I saw those two places, I thought it might have been a boring worm.  However, on closer inspection, I noticed the oyster had reinforced those spots on the inside of it’s shell and the holes did not go all the way through.  Therefore I am inclined to think the cause of death must have been something else.  It’s sort of a mystery though.

The weigh and measure went well.  When I put the entries into my graph, I discovered that the average for my sample this week was smaller than last weeks.  For length the average was 1.56mm smaller and for weight the average was .3g smaller.  I think this indicates that the oysters haven’t grown this week.  I am not very surprised.  Although the water temperature and cell density did rise over last weekend, the drop during the week disrupted the upward trend.  Oysters need constant water temperatures above 50 degrees Fahrenheit to grow.

Something I should mention about my averaging.  I changed my system a little bit from last week.  I highlighted the outliers of each section (high and low), so that I can exclude them from the average.  I played with the numbers a little bit and I decided that it rounds the numbers out.