Went diving this week

So, I got back in the water this week for the first time since December... And to be quite honest, it wasn't that bad... I mean I did have my new Diving Concepts drysuit, which works so well, I felt almost too hot... But it was pretty cool...

Tuesday we were in the water in Hallock Bay, a shallow body of water with a narrow inlet into Orient Harbor. This bay is the site of my grass mat deployments, but it is also the site of a free plant spawner sanctuary. Free plant means that scallops are just released to the bottom - no nets or cages here. Last November we planted about 70,000 seed scallops to the bottom in a bouyed off area, and dove on the site on Tuesday to look at overwinter mortality. The first site we looked at was almost heartbreaking - while we were still getting around 5 live scallops per square meter, we had extremely high mortality. We think this is partly attributed to the 100% macroalgae cover and the anoxic layer underneath the algae that results from such a dense assemblage. Many of the scallops were "trapped" in this layer, probably due to the late planting date, with the water too cold for the scallops to be very active and try to move up onto the canopy. However, not far away, where the cover was not as dense and had more Codium, we were finding upwards of 20 per square meter still surviving, which was very good to see. In other portions of this bay we didn't find too many seed scallops, although we found a few large, possibly year 2 adults. Hopefully we see better numbers in Hallock Bay this year with the decent overwinter survival of the free planted scallops.

Wednesday we dove mostly in Orient Harbor, first near the long lines where we have probably near 500,000 scallops hanging in lantern nets. We had decent seed recruitment there in the fall, and at various places within Orient, so we wanted to look at overwinter mortality. Some places we dove had fewer scallops than in the fall, and some places had far more scallops. All in all, we are seeing some decent returns from last fall. We have about 14 more sites to visit next week, so we will see whats going on then, but right now, things look like they are going to be ok.

On a lighter note, there was alot more activity going on in the bays then I expected. Spider crabs were out in the dozens, and it appeared to me as if many of them were mating, although I am not 100% about the mating rituals of spider crabs. Lots of whelks moving around the bottom too, as well as some drills. I also saw a very large (at least it looked large underwater) winter flounder, which was very docile. I was petting it and it barely moved. It finally swam away when I grabbed its tail. If only I had one of the larger dive bags I am confident I would have had dinner! I also saw a couple of skates, although which species I am not sure. They don't like to be touched at all, and when I tried to rub their backs they darted off. Anyway, some pretty exciting stuff, diving with my new drysuit, seeing some scallops, and seeing pretty interesting things as well. I can't wait until next week.

after meeting update

well, a few things... first, both meetings went great... the scallop session on the first day was very informative - learned that new jersey is sort of at the crossroads for the two Argopecten irradians varieties on the east coast - the southern subspecies that spawns in the fall and the northern subspecies that spawns in the summer... for years the jersey scallops exhibited similar traits to the southern scallop, but after a die-off, there were relatively few scallops... after a good set in the south shore of long island, the next summer, there was a good set in new jersey with scallops exhibiting traits to the northern variety... very interesting...

also, it seems that scallop fisheries have collapsed along the coast in the mid 1980s, although not all due to the brown tide, such as the case for new york... it is curious that the crashes have happened at similar times due to different reasons, but as of right now it is unexplained for all locations... the general consensus for lack of recovery is the low recruitment success due to low spawner densities, although i still believe it has something to do with a lack of suitable habitat and changing habitat...

but thanks to a plug during the day long scallop session, my poster was mobbed during the poster session... i literally did not get a break from the start of the poster session to the end, which is good... i even had some people approach me afterwards bc they wanted to see my poster but never got a chance to come over and talk to me about it... so it was very exciting...

as for benthics, that went well too... i saw a lot of interesting talks, including one about Codium fragile and epifauna associated with eelgrass, although it was in Canada, so not scallops... but it was interesting to see that they demonstrated higher species richness in codium versus eelgrass 0 driven in particular by more gastropods, which is interesting... they use an interesting method to sample, something i would like to learn more about... i also saw another talk about blue crabs using macroalgae as an alternate habitat in the absence of eelgrass, which was also interesting and something i think warrants some investigation up here...

oh and my talk went extremely well... i ran through it about 3-4 times during the meetings, and then once in my head right before my talk... i opened with a joke, which i think lightened my mood a bit and made me less nervous, although i could feel my right hand shaking a little bit at the beginning, they audience said they couldnt tell... as a matter of fact, many of the people i talked to said they would never have guessed that was my first talk... and it seemed like a lot of people came for my talk because a lot of people left right afterwards...

all in all it was a nice week... i got to see roger mann and richard lutz give talks... partied it up in providence, and even unexpectedly got to see toots and the maytals... it was a very good time...

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...