Wow...

Ok, I really need to start doing a better job. I mean really, how can I be better at posting during my busy field season than my slow season? It probably has to do with not taking any cool pictures while I am cutting open scallops in the lab and punching numbers into the computer. That said, it has been a pretty exciting off-season for me. I started presenting my research on scallops in Codium to pretty good reviews at the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation meeting in Portland, Oregon in November. Portland is a pretty cool city and we were lucky to have nice weather for essentially the whole week there. While there I was able to interact with Dr Bob Orth, a noted seagrass biologist who has recently demonstrated great success in restoring eelgrass meadows via seed dispersal. Because of their success with seagrasses, a group at VIMS wants to try to bring back a commercially important associated epifauna, and one that is dear to my heart, the bay scallop. So we had talked about their restoration efforts compared with those in New York, and I was able to make a very valuable connection. Oh, and I won an award for the 2nd best student presentation!

Then, for New Years, I was able to vacation in beautiful Kadavu, Fiji, for 3 weeks. Just scuba diving. Relaxing. Kayaking. Relaxing. Hiking. Oh, and relaxing. I went with a bunch of Southampton College (now defunct) of LIU alums, and an old professor and friend of mine. We stayed at the Matava Eco-Adventure Resort, dedicated to diving and fishing. I did somewhere in the ball park of 35 dives (although the exact number right now is escaping me), and I would do it again in a heartbeat if I ever have the opportunity. It was an amazing trip, and pictures will follow.

It was hard to adjust back to labwork when I returned from this trip, but I starting catching up, including working on 2 new manuscripts about our restoration work, since the results are very, very promising. And then we left for the Benthic Ecology Meeting hosted at UNCW. It was a great time, I gave another presentation, this time on my work with scallop recruitment. Again, a lot of positive feedback, which is always nice, and many more connections.

Anyway, I promise that I will make a better effort to post more often.

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.

Wow its been a while!!!

Sorry all. Summer is my busy season, and while I have been snapping lots of photos and working on my research, I have not been very religious in my postings. I will try to do a better job from here on out.

So, some good news, I have my second manuscript accepted for publication in Marine Biology. I still need to make some minor revisions, but that was still very exciting.
My abstract was accepted as an oral presentation at the upcoming CERF meetings in Portland, Oregon.
I am trying to save money for a diving trip to Fiji this January, where while I hope to participate in many fun dives, I also hope to do a research project involving seagrass meadows there.



But onto the current research- we are seeing larger scallop sets this year than all the previous years combined. In 4 spat collection dates, we have already collected over 30,000 seed scallops. That may not seem like many, but its more than the previous 4 years of monitoring combined. This seems to indicate that the multiple spawning sanctuaries we have set up are working, and in past years may have seeded pockets of spawning individuals in other portions of the bay. This is good news for bay scallops and Long Island. However, I must not be to quick to celebrate, as there is a lot that can happen between now and November 2010, when this years scallop set will be old enough to harvest.






This is also good for my actual research, one aspect of which is examining the roles seagrass patch architecture might play in recruitment, growth and survival. While I have been working on the recruitment and growth aspects of this project, but I had not been observing recruitment to my mats. This has changed this year - likely a combination of a slight change to my recruitment collector design and the apparent increase in larvae in the water column - I have collected ~700 scallops on my artificial seagrass units. This was very exciting. In my two collections thus far, there seems to be a natural experiment going on - in three weeks, the collectors went from an average of 124 per square meter to 56 per square meter - a 50% reduction in a 3 week time frame. This is likely due to predation, but I will have a better idea in the next 4 weeks when I have 2 more collections. This was all very exciting to me.

Even more exciting, is that in addition to seeing scallop seeds set on eelgrass, we are also starting to find scallops set on species of macroalgae. This will hopefully start to shift some of the old ideas that only eelgrass is suitable for bay scallops, because we are observing in the Peconics scallops in and on many other potential habitats!







Lots of exciting things. Stay Tuned!

Scallop surveys!

So I went diving on Monday to do some more of the benthic surveys. During the summer, from June through November, we have our spat collectors in the water to track larval settlement. In November and December, we do benthic surveys at our collector sites so we can see if what comes up in the collectors is translating to the bottom. Then, in the spring, we go back to the same sites to determine the over winter mortality. These dives are exciting, because in the last year we are seeing more scallops here than we have seen in previous years, which indicates the restoration effort is probably working. But aside from the scallops, I often see a lot of other cool things. Every dive I observe spider crabs, mud crabs and whelks, those are fairly common. Some commonly seen fish include gobies and cunner. But occasionally I come across cool things, like this fluke, Paralichthys dentatus:



I also saw this skate, which I believe to be a little skate:

And some sort of mud shrimp:


And finally, these two crabs teaming up to try to eat the whelk:

Some sort of comb jelly (in the bottom of the photo)
And, as always, lots of scallops!!!!

Scallops make comeback

"RANDEE DADDONA PHOTO These well-fed Peconic Bay scallops were raised in a hatchery on Cedar Beach in Southold. The work of local biologists to boost populations of the delectable shellfish, devastated by brown tide in the mid-1990s, is paying off. "

this article was just highlighted in the Suffolk Times. Yes it is a local paper, but this is pretty big news - the best scallop year in the Peconics since 1995. That's nothing to laugh at. We are keeping our fingers crossed, but so far, the results are looking good!
The highlights:
-The largest bay scallop sanctuary in the world
- 500.000 scallops
- Commercial landings from last November and December in the Peconics were the highest they have been since 1995
- Scallop stocks in some local waters are 13 times higher than they were 5 years ago