NSA and BEM 2008

Photo by Stephen T Tettelbach

So, this weekend, I am preparing for the National Shellfish Association's 100th Annual Meeting, which starts Sunday night and runs thru Thursday morning. Immediately following that meeting is the Benthic Ecology Meeting, which starts Thursday and runs thru Sunday. So, the good news is I will be spending a week in Providence. The bad news is I will be spending a week in Providence. However, it is still very exciting. This will be my first NSA meeting, and I am presenting a poster on some of the bay scallop research I have been working on the past two summers. I am very excited to get feedback from scallop experts. My poster is entitled "A Bay Scallop's Brave New World: Can the introduced Codium fragile act as an eelgrass surrogate?" Now that I have been analyzing the data for a few months, and working up the rest of the samples, we are starting to see some pretty interesting results about Codium's potential as a bay scallop habitat. Also exciting is posters presented by two of my bay scallop partner's in crime, self proclaimed spat master Andrew and hose-getter Dennis, both graduate students of Stephen Tettelbach (Long Island's resident bay scallop expert) of LIU. Andrew was lucky enough to actually observe bay scallop mass spawning in the field while diving and will be presenting that work, entitled "Direct observation of bay scallop, Argopecten irradians irradians, spawning in New York waters." Not only was he able to observe this spawning event, it was part of a monitoring project looking at scallops in spawner sanctuaries and tracking gonadal indices. They were able to demonstrate that spawning occured after spikes in temperature AND periods of moderate disturbance, which was very interesting. This work has been published, and you can read it by looking up this citation:
Tettelbach, S.T. and A. Weinstock. 2008. Direct observation of bay scallop spawning in New York waters. Bull. Mar. Sci. 82(2): 213-219.

Finally, Dennis was working on 19 years worth of collected scallop shells looking at the prevalence of "small seed" scallops within scallop populations of the Peconic estuary. His poster is entitled " The Importance of Fall Recruitment in New York Bay Scallop Populations: Variability in Size of Annual Growth Rings and Total Shell Size over a 19 year period," and he has some very interesting results as well. All in all we are very excited to be presenting our scallop research at the NSA.



As for the BEM, my lab group will be well represented - 3 oral presentations and 2 posters. I will be presenting my work with hard clams and eelgrass, which I had an earlier post about. This is very exciting but also nerve-racking as it will be my first oral presentation in front of an audience of peers and experts in the field. And despite getting a pretty poor time slot (8:45 AM on Saturday morning) I am fairly confident it will be moderately well attended, especially since Paul Bologna, from Montclair State University, a seagrass expert colleague of my advisor, is giving a presentation immediately before mine.



I will check back in after its all been said and done and report anything exciting that we find!

Seagrass.LI

At the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County's Marine Environmental Learning Center works a team of eelgrass restoration experts. They have been actively working to restore eelgrass meadows to their past glory throughout the Peconic Estuary, and more recently have been working in Long Island Sound and in the South Shore estuaries. About twice a year they release a newsletter that highlights some of the work they are involved in. The current newsletter also highlights the scallop restoration project being undertaken in Suffolk County, a project which I am involved, and a project that allows me to conduct much of my bay scallop research.

Click here to read the current newsletter.

Also, if you would like to visit their website, click here.

I have worked with this group in the past, and all members are very knowledgable in habitat restoration. They have experienced success in many of their transplant and restoration sites, and even developed their own methods for restoration. Now that the importance of eelgrass for many species has been ackowledged by the state of New York, which recently held a meeting of national and international seagrass experts to create an "eelgrass task force" to identify areas of research that are important to understand the dynamics of eelgrass survivng on Long Island and how best to protect it, the job of both the Cornell seagrass restoration team and Dr Brad Peterson's (of Stony Brook University) Seagrass Rangers, a team of graduate students to which I belong, has never been more important.

To see the seagrass ecology lab website, click here.

Jan/Feb Update

Well, again, this time of the year moves real slow. I occupy a lot of my time entering data, writing reports and proposals, doing prep for the upcoming field season, and longing for the days when I can get back on the water. But, right now, there isn't too much going on. I submitted a paper for publication back in November and got the reviews back recently. They weren't great but they weren't terrible. I am hoping that with the proper revisions, as recommended by the reviewers, that it will eventually make it into publication. Also, with help from my adviser, I have begun to analyze the data from planting scallops in various habitats, and there is a very interesting story developing, especially when we look at natural recruits. Its very exciting. I am going to present the scallop work at the National Shellfish Association 100th Anniversary Meeting in Providence this coming April. As I start to make the charts and presentation, I will post more information about that project here. Otherwise, things are going well with my research. I have a few projects I will be working on this summer, of course the spat collectors again, my eelgrass mats with scallop growth (and I might do some RNA/DNA work if I decide the results will be worth the hassle) and survival (hopefully it works this time, but I have found some new tether methods I hope will work out better). I am also going to be investigating the impacts of water quality on the growth and survival of the big three bivalves (clams, oysters and scallops). There are plenty of other side projects I hope to conduct and be involved with, but as it stands right now, I will be plenty busy. If you have any ideas, let me know!

Long time!

Well it has been quite some time since I last updated my blog... The field season was winding down, and I have just been busy with other things... Helping release scallops for overwintering, doing some dive surveys, and helping with the eelgrass restoration guys at SCMELC... So, I have been pretty busy... I have also been working up some data from this summer, which I intend to present some of the research at the National Shellfish Association meeting and the Benthic Ecology Meeting, both in Providence in April, so I am working up the rest of the data now that the field season is over... Once I make some sense with the data I will put some nice figures up here so you can see what I am working on...

Scallop spat

Well, yesterday was the last spat collector day of the season... Spat collectors, essentially mesh bags suspended in the water column, collect larval mollusks, crustaceans, squirts, and sometimes even fish... We use them to track scallop settlement throughout the Peconic Bays, in order to see approximate numbers and areas where they are being transported... Towards the end of the season, we do visual benthic surveys along transects at the spat collector locations to see if what we are catching in the nets is translating to the bottom... In other words, if we have a location where we get alot of spat in the bags, but no seed on the bottom when we do our visual surveys, we can assume that there is some source of high post settlement mortality, which in many cases is predation... I digress from the subject... The collectors are collected every 6 weeks and there are 2 sets which are off-set 3 weeks apart to ensure scallop spat that may be too small one one set should show up on the second set of bags...
Again, yesterday was the last day of the season for our spat bags, and surprisingly, we were still finding scallop spat, at 2-3 mm. On Wednesday we saw similar numbers of scallops... What does this mean? well it would seem that these scallops were spawned sometime in October... Scallop larvae usually spend around 2 weeks in the water column before settlement, and since these bags went out in October, it can be assumed that these scallops were spawned late September/early October, further evidence for fall spawning in bay scallops in NY waters... Is this related to warmer water temperatures later in the season? Perhaps, but I haven't investigated that avenue... It is just very exciting news for the scallop population, a seemingly steady spawn throughout the entire season, and even continued spawning through the fall... Yes, the number of spat on these last few collectors have not been as high as those during the summer, according to my professor, these are the highest numbers he's seen collected this late in the season over the course of the past few years... Further, in visual surveys, we are finding higher numbers of seed than ever before, although still much lower scallop densities than historic numbers.... Either way, its seems to be good news for the scallops, and good news for the countless people that have been working hard to restore bay scallop populations...

A different project:

While the focus of this blog will be concentrating the various aspects of my current graduate research, I wanted to make a small diversion to some research I did a few years ago with hard clams and eelgrass. I did benthic surveys for eelgrass abundance and hard clam densities in Shinnecock and Quantuck Bays on Long Island. While I only found 14% of the sites to have eelgrass, 67% of eelgrass sites had hard clams present, and only 33% of all other sites had hard clams present. Further, the densities of hard clams in eelgrass sites were double the densities outside of eelgrass. The reasons for this have been greatly explored in the literature, most often that below ground biomass of eelgrass offers a refuge from predation by crabs and whelks. However, little work ha been done to determine the impacts hard clams have on eelgrass. I was able to show that the addition of one hard clam to a quadrat of eelgrass (the equivalent of 16 hard clams per square meter) increased the eelgrass productivity (growth) about as much as a commercial fertilizer via nutrient additions. How? Hard clams filter the water column of phytoplankton and small zooplankton, and then repackage those as nutrients released to the sediments, which the eelgrass then uses for growth. It seems that there is an interactive relationship between the hard clams and eelgrass. I just submitted this work for publication in the Marine Ecology Progress Series, and if it gets accepted, it will be my first publication.

So a teacher I worked with put this article in the school district newspaper...

Gardiner Manor Students Participate in University Research Project

Gardiner Manor students assisted Marine Biologist John carroll in his quest to solve the mystery of the vanishing Long Island scallop. Inspired by Mrs. Forman's students, who first became involved, Kids for Saving The Earth Club and the Gardiner Manor Service Club members put in tireless hours last year threading green ribbon onto plastic mats. These artificial eelgrass mats were submerged in Hallock Bay (on the notrth shore of Long Island near Orient Point) in hopes that they would attract various aquatic animals and provide a safe habitat for the scallops.

Threading the mats was a tedious job and it took a lot of patience! Mr. Carroll has since reported that small fish such as silverslides and killifish quickly colonized the "eelgrass", along with pipefish, small flounder, sea bass, grass shrimp and numerous species of crabs. Best of all, the scallop population is thriving! Visit John Carroll's website at http://zostera.blogspotcom/ for more of the scientific details.