No photos, only disappointment

Well, I went to remove the second set of my recruitment squares on Monday with hopes for better results than last time. Well, unfortunately, there was no scallop spat again on my mats. NONE!!! This is becoming a little disappointing. I understand that finding spat on grass is like finding a needle in a hay stack. But I should see something, anything. out of 72 squares, 360 shoots, and only 1 Crepidula fornicata and 1 mud crab. WHAT? In my "control" spat collectors, similar to the ones we use for the monitoring efforts, I didn't get any scallop spat either, and didn't get anything else other than mud crabs!!! This is not good. Whats worse, we had another round of the spat collectors and not a single scallop spat in any of the collectors placed in Hallock Bay, and when we monitored our free planting site from last winter, we only found 5 scallops in 24 square meters. I am worried that I won't get any spat on my mats at all, and this means I might have to find a new location to look at recruitment. On a better note, I did place out 680 scallops for monitoring growth on bare sand, at the patch edge and in the patch center. That should go better, at least I hope.

Marking scallops

Well, I finally got my bee tags from the Bee Works. It took a while to get, bc they were out of stock when I ordered them and were accidentally shipped to the wrong place (Southampton instead of Cutchogue, but I got it figured out). Anyway, I got them, and so I glued them onto my scallops yesterday. I will measure the scallops on Sunday and they will get deployed to my mats on Monday. At the same time, I will also be removing set 2 of my recruitment squares and putting out set 4. I will keep you posted about that, but I wanted to throw these pictures of the marking process up here. Enjoy!

Diving in Flanders

As part of our free plant scallop monitoring, I went diving in Flanders Bay, the westernmost of the Peconic Estuary system, to do quadrat counts and collect scallops for gonad index analysis - we can use this to see if and when the scallops have spawned. The counts revealed ~2 scallops per square meter - much lower than the original planting densities, but still fairly decent numbers considering the un-ideal bottom. That said, I saw a northern puffer (YAY!) in my first quadrat. This is exciting because their numbers have been severely reduced in recent years. However, puffers are potential scallop predators, so I don't know how excited I should be. However, they may also inhibit mud crab predation on scallops. Either way, it was exciting. I saw sea nettles, tons of comb jellies (ctenophores), that puffer, tons of silversides, blackfish and cunners, whelks, mud crabs, and of course scallops - oh and some red beard sponges. It was actually a pretty decent dive. Take a look at the pictures.

Back in action today

photo by Steve Tettelbach


Well, I checked on my mats last week... everything looked good. I had to go back today to pick up my first set of recruitment squares. But more on that later. This week was the first "spat week" of the summer, well the first official spat week anyway. 6 weeks ago we placed out the first set of spat collectors at 24 different sites throughout the Peconics. Three weeks after that, we deployed the second set. Tuesday and Wednesday, we retrieved the first set we deployed (having soaked for 6 weeks) and dropped in set #3. The idea behind the collectors is that we place mesh bags in the water with a plastic mesh insert that larval scallops and other organisms will settle on when they are ready to come out of the water column. Of course, we are most interested in scallops, but we also monitor other things that we catch in these nets, including jingle shells, blue mussels, mortons egg cockles, and arc shells among the bivalves, and slipper shells, lacuna snails, and lunar dove snails among the gastropods. We also often get numerous mud crabs, although sometimes they get in through holes in the collector. Anyway, on Tuesday we collected over 1,000 scallop spat, which is the most we have ever collected this early in the season (this is now the 4th year of the monitoring). That means that we had an earlier spawn than normal this year, at least an earlier first spawn for scallops. Additionally, we observed a large mussel set, which is unusual, since we hadn't seen one this large either, especially considering there are no substantial mussel populations near our collectors. Either way, it was very exciting! On Wednesday, we didn't collect nearly as many, but it was still encouraging, because the collectors we checked were not near any known scallop populations or spawning sanctuaries, so the fact that we found as many as we did was very good!


So taking this good news, I went to my site today to retrieve my recruitment squares. I was not sure what to expect. My grass mats are in Hallock Bay, were we did free plant scallops last winter, but also where our spat collectors recovered very few scallop spat throughout the whole little bay (<10). sticklebacks , killifish, silversides, cunner, tautog, and sea bass, and lots of mud crabs, climbing my seagrass!!!! Very exciting day indeed, even though I didn't get any spat and lost all my pictures!


Oh, and as an aside, during a lunch break on the boat on Tuesday, we hauled up on a beach in Little Bay in Orient Beack State Park. There is a tidal pond there and I observed sheepshead minnows mating! Pretty awesome week...

I tried again

This time the slideshow worked out a little bit better...

New Photos and update!!!

Well, it has been a while... I have been busy finishing up the mats, finishing up writing an EPA report, moving, among other things, but I have also been in the water quite a few times since the last update... As is already says, I did win the best student poster award at the National Shellfish Association meeting... I also recently found out my first manuscript was accepted by the Marine Ecology Progress Series, which is exciting... I also finished my grass mats, and put them in the water 2 weeks ago and revisited the site today... Saw some cool things - tons of blue crabs (see the slideshow), also baby flounder, hundreds of silversides and grass shrimp (all of which were gone once i got the camera, of course)... Then we went over to the longlines hanging in Orient Harbor, NY, where they keep scallops in nets to spawn, where I tried to take some pictures, but of course they didn't come out at all... I did get some pictures of scallops out of the nets, which we sample for gonads, which is how we tell when they spawn... Anyway, things are going well right now, and I have a lot of different projects going on, so anticipate more photos for the summer... Oh, and check out my picasa web album for today here if the slideshow doesn't work out...

POSTER AWARD!!!

So, as it turns out, I recieved an award for the poster I made presenting my scallop survival poster at the National Shellfish Association's 100th Annual Meeting last month in Providence, RI entitled "A Bay Scallop's Brave New World: Can the introduced Codium fragile act as an eelgrass surrogate?"

This is very exciting. Here is the email:

"Congratulations!

Your poster presentation entitled “A bay scallop's brave new world: Can the introduced Codium fragile act as an eelgrass surrogate?” at the 100th National Shellfisheries Association meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, has been recognized with our Association's Gordon Gunter Award for Best Student Poster. As a recipient of the Gunter Award you will receive one year of free membership to the National Shellfisheries Association, which includes a subscription to the Journal of Shellfish Research. On behalf of the society we applaud your efforts.

Sincerely,
Ryan B. Carnegie
Ami E. Wilbur
Co-Chairs, Student Endowment Awards"

This really made my day, and makes me excited to finish writing the report for the EPA and turning it into another manuscript.

The abstract for the poster is:

Bay scallops, Argopecten irradians, once supported a vibrant fishery on Long Island, but were pushed to the brink of local extinction after a series of brown tide blooms in the 1980’s. Restoration efforts, which commenced at the time of the fishery collapse, were somewhat successful but since 1995 scallop populations have remained well below historic levels. Despite many reasons for this lack of recovery, loss and alteration of habitat is often considered the major player. The potential role of the existing eelgrass (Zostera marina), the preferred bay scallop habitat, and macroalgae as suitable bay scallop habitat was investigated at 4 time points over 2 years. Tagged juvenile bay scallops were free planted to the bottom and tethered in 6 different habitats for a period of one week and percent recovery was calculated. Recovery numbers were highest in eelgrass, however, dense stands of Codium fragile exhibited statistically identical recovery to eelgrass. Eelgrass and codium both performed significantly better than replicate releases on bare sediment and dense drift macroalgae. These results can help managers to plan more efficient restoration efforts by locating potential habitats where scallop survival would be highest, even in the absence of eelgrass.