Who are you?

Seriously, what is this crab?
I saw them diving, and they just seemed to look a bit different to me. Mottled coloration, more roundish shape, odd looking claws. At first I thought it might be an invasive from Asia that has established in the Caribbean and some southeastern states, Charybdis sp., but the numbers of lateral spines or teeth and teeth between the orbits are not right. So maybe its something else from the tropics, a casualty of Gulf Stream transport and meandering eddies?
Any ideas?

You can run but you can't hide!

I use the term run lightly, however it kind of looks like they are waddling back and forth rather than swimming doesn't it? Scallop swimming is very funny, much funnier on video than it is when your actually underwater. This video was taken from one of our planting sites for the restoration effort in the peconics. While all bay scallops possess the ability to swim, and many do, for some reason, the scallops at this particular site seem to do it all the time. It might be a water quality thing, as the clarity here is typically lower than that at other sites we plant, but whatever the reason is, its always a fun dive.


For some reason I cannot seem to post the long video, its not loading. You can try to view it here. See if you can spot the little seed scallop swimming up off the bottom (its ok if you don't, I had to watch 3 times to see it). Also notice the healthy scallops in a habitat dominated by macroalgae and no eelgrass. Interesting, isn't it?

If at first you don't succeed

Try, try again?
Well last year I submitted a manuscript to the Journal of Shellfish Research for publication about the field studies I was doing with scallop survival in different habitats. It was rejected outright. I was dejected. But, I took a while to think about it, took all of the reviewers comments and decided that I could make the paper work, somehow, and try again. Even though I won an award for this work when I presented it as a student at the National Shellfish Association's 100th annual meeting, things needed to be worked out. With the co-authors, I set out to re-write the manuscript in a more readable and presentable manner. We cut out the extemporaneous materials, the unquantified text and thought we had something still worthy of publication. We wanted to get out information out there: that the introduced alga, Codium fragile, could serve as a potential predation refuge for the bay scallop, in a similar manner to native eelgrass. The data was the same, the way it was presented was different. I went to the benthic ecology meetings in Texas and presented the work there to get more feedback. I tried submitting it to another journal. This time the results were different. Success!!!!! My manuscript was accepted to Marine Biology. No proofs yet, but still very exciting to know the work was deemed worthy for peer-reviewed publication.
But this whole saga has helped me re-direct a portion of my dissertation work, one in which I focus on multiple aspects of the impacts of Codium on bay scallops - not just short term (1 week long trials) survival. I placed adult scallops in eelgrass, Codium and bare sediment to monitor their gonad indices and growth over a 10 week period. I have placed juvenile scallops at the same locations as well as other locations with codium and eelgrass. These are still out in the field. In addition to monitoring their survival and growth (in predatory exclusion cages), I am also monitoring water quality conditions such as chlorophyll, in addition to sediment conditions such as benthic chlorophyll and porosity. Hopefully soon I will have a better grasp on the way scallops and Codium interact.