You've got to suffer is you want to sing the (Spat collection) blues!

Wow, first, I did not realize it has been such a long time since my last update. I have been very busy with writing a manuscript and trying frantically to finish up the field season (although I still have another month to go). A few weeks ago, I went out sampling for my recruitment squares. If you remember, my last post about them suggested that I should not abandon hope, as I was finally starting to see some small spat. I was, of course, very excited. Well, I was dealt a crushing blow. Two weeks ago we were seeing a very high number of spat in collectors within Hallock Bay, which lead me to believe that I would most certainly find spat this time around on my mats, at least more than the last time, even if it wouldn't be alot. So, extremely excited, my advisor, Dr Brad Peterson, and I headed out to my field site to collect my recruitment squares from my grass mats. Now, this is no easy feat, and requires a few hours in the water searching for them (I guess I could have planned the relocation aspect a bit better) and a couple more hours going through the samples. As always, I have my own set of spat collectors at my site which I use as a "control;" the idea here is that if there are larvae in the water, I know they will recruit to the collectors, and that will give me a decent idea of what I might expect to see. I always process the collectors before my squares, so I know what to look for (ie, should I see any scallops at all? what sizes should I be looking for?). Well, as it turns out, I had a fairly large number in my collectors, which had me thinking awesome! My recruitment experiment is finally coming together!



2 hours later, I had a decidedly different opinion on my recruitment experiment: FAILURE!!! We found only 1 scallop spat on all the squares collected. ONLY 1!!! This is not nearly what I was hoping for, and certainly doesn't bode well for what I thought would be a fairly big portion of at least 1 chapter of my thesis work. It is pretty disheartening, putting in all that work ( a full day's worth of work for 2 people) to only come away with 1 scallop. Granted, the supply in the system might not be very high, and I might not have received numbers good enough to run any sorts of statistical analysis. However, 1 scallop? On a day I expected to see many more, given what had happened on the last time I sampled my squares and what we saw in our spat collectors. But no, it is a failure. I have one more collection scheduled, next week, and then I can truly decide which is a bigger failure, my recruitment experiment, or the New York Mets season.

Status Update...

Well, no pictures this time! Last week we went out to measure my scallops again. If you don't remember, the last time I went out to my site to do the 2 week measurement, I lost ~30% of my scallops. My suspicions were they were dead or dying when I put them out - confirmed by the fact that their sizes were more or less exactly the same as they were when I initially measured them. The lack of any mortality this past time also supports the idea that they must have died bc of transport practices, something I will need to reconsider the next time I run this experiment. But I was very happy to see the survival as such, and to see the scallops growing well. This will run until the end of October, when I will also run a predation experiment again to see any differences between summer and fall, when the predator community is likely both different and more inactive. I also might be doing an overwintering experiment with my mats - more on that as I figure it out.

One in Fifty-Million... So you are saying there is a chance!!!

That's right... The fairly rare "half-cooked" lobster... So I decided to pay a visit to a couple of friends of mine in Rhode Island, fellow alumni of the now defunct Southampton College of Long Island University.

One, Greg, in addition to having graduated from Southampton with a marine science degree and working towards a Master's from URI, still runs his lobster boat almost daily. His family owns and operated their own lobster company, Sakonnet Lobster Company in Little Compton, RI.

Last year, one of his brother's netted the one in 50 million half and half lobster, that was even featured in prominent news. It is rare, but not unheard of, as a year before, one was caught in Maine. Either way, it is still pretty exciting, and I was able to actually see it in person while I was looking around the shop.

It was a fun trip, going out on the lobster boat, being science nerds (talking about our research projects during a barbecue and Greg free-diving to the bottom to pick up "knobby-conchs"), and just relaxing. Rhode Island, and in particular Sakonnet Point, is a very nice, relatively upspoiled place with beautiful rocky coastline that I recommend everyone visit at least once.

Working in the coal mine... (on the barge)

Well, yesterday I worked on the barge - its a boat built by S.P.A.T. volunteers working with the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County. It is used mainly for the scallop restoration work, and is equipped with a motorized winch and a star wheel for hauling up lines weighed down by hundreds of lantern nets full of scallops.



This time of the year, the majority of scallops in the nets have spawned at least once, so they need to be relocated to make room for the next batch of scallops to grow-out before overwintering. It can be a labor intensive process as the nets are heavily weighed down by fouling organisms, in particular sea squirts. It is essentially pulling up a net full of scallops, as well as hundreds of little water packets (the squirts) so the nets get pretty heavy. Then, most of the squirts need to be knocked off before the bags can be opened and the scallops dumped on deck, so it is also a very messy process, and sometimes, not very easy as an invasive sea squirt, Styela clava,

have very strong attachment points to the nets and to shells within the nets. Once the nets are cleaned and the scallops dumped onto deck, they need to be released to the bottom.

Some of the scallops are pretty fouled (the latter two were collected a day earlier),



but it adds to the camoflage for the scallops on the bottom. The nets also often have lots of little guests in them, including hundreds of grass shrimp and mud crabs, spider crabs, cunner and tautog, and even sculpin.


Sometimes we get pipefish and seahorses from the nets but this is more rare. Additionally, some of this years seed (scallops from earlier spawns this year) have set on the nets and grown very well.

All in all, it was a nice, messy day on the boat with some interesting things to see, including this awesome schooner, the Mary E, on our way home.

More updates - Fun Diving...

Well, I just talked about Monday's work diving - searching and collecting the recruitment squares, and then replacing them. But we ended up finishing that fairly quickly this time (only a couple of hours) and we had a prospective student for next fall (09) with us - a former Master of Science student from Dauphin Island Sea Lab who currently works for a consulting firm in Florida and deals with habitat restoration and monitoring, and inparticular, seagrass restoration and monitoring. The day ended earlier than usual at my field site, so we stopped at a couple of other spots on the way home to do some fun dives, and so I could show my friend around.
First, we stopped at the long lines in Orient Harbor (which I talk about here in my first ever post.) Now the long lines essentially are just that, rows of lines with anywhere from 100-200 or more lantern nets hanging so that the scallops are suspended mid water column - out of the reach of predators on the bottom and not exposed to air from above. (On a side note, lantern nets make great closet additions - hanging a five tiered net or two in your closet eliminates the need for a dresser, for example, and they are good to store food in as well). Now I mention the long line site, bc I have dove on it quite a few times this summer and it always creeps me out - the water is murky (it is Long Island, afterall) and you just see these large dark objects come into view just hanging there, motionless,fouled with all sorts of algae, squirts, tunicates and sponges.
When I am working with the nets, opening them under water, reaching in to sample scallops

, sometimes I get spun around and another net hits me in the back, or a line from the bottom of the net hits my fin - this always freaks me out just a bit.
Either way, they are cool to see so we went there, looked at the nets, where I tried to get a picture of some of the fouling organisms.
We also went to the bottom near the nets to see any scallops released near the nets
and to just look around and see what we could find - and we had quite the find - a mantis shrimp, just walking around, and at one point looking right at me! Pretty awesome.

Next we stopped over at a healthy Zostera bed at Hay Beach on the northeast side of Shelter Island, especially since our visitor is particularly interested in seagrass. We saw some pretty cool stuff there as well, including juvenile flounder



just swimming around. There were also cunner, tautog, and pipefish.

We also found a few whelks and a scallop spat!

And of course, lots of silversides following us around, as we were stirring things up. Now silversides are nearly impossible to catch with the camera, at least for me, since they are almost transparent and blend in with the water, plus they swim around so fast, but I was able to capture a few of them here (oh and that out of focus blog at the center in the upper half of the photo is a comb jelly, or ctenophore).

All in all a fairly good day!

Do Not Abandon Hope, Ye of Little Faith

So, a few posts back I was disappointed in the lack of scallop spat on my mats and in Hallock Bay in general. We had not really seen any in our collectors which we use to monitor spat in any of the collections, and so I was not so upset that I wasn't finding them on my mats, just figuring they weren't around. I was a little worried though, since scallop recruitment is a part of my research, and I was already thinking about possibilities of new locations for next year. I was ready to give up on the recruitment thing all together, since it is a lot of work to make the recruitment squares, to search for the squares within the mats, and to put new squares back on, not to mention I didn't want to keep wasting fuel for fruitless boat trips to my site. However, after much deliberation, I decided to make a new set of squares over the weekend to put one more set out there, just to be sure I wouldn't miss it.
Well we went to the site on Monday to collect my 3rd set of recruitment squares and to replace them with the 5th (and final) set. I also keep a set of spat collectors at the center of my array to make sure scallops are recruiting to the area using a known method for sampling them. I always process the spat collectors first, just so I have an idea of what to expect on my squares. Guess what?

Scallop spat in my collectors!! This was exciting. It wasn't a lot, only 16 total out of 3 bags, but I honestly didn't think I would see any. I still wasn't sure what to expect on my mats, but at least I was happy there were spat in the area. After processing all the recruitment squares, I did have spat on the mats! Success!! Well, kind of - we only found 4 total spat on the squares, not quite numbers that I can use for any kind of stats. However, now I know that if there are spat in the area, they will potentially settle on my mats, which was very refreshing to find.


Oh, and there is better news, the spat that we found was mostly small - 2-4mm. This is good, because it means the spawn happened relatively recently, and will probably show up on my next set of collectors. Second, and more exciting, is what we found today - in our spat monitoring we have 5 sites within Hallock Bay where we have sets of collectors, and we found spat at all of them, and in decent numbers (some bags over 20 scallops) and again, many were small. So I am keeping my fingers crossed that I will see much better numbers on my mats during my next collection!

A slide show as I promised...

Pretty cool pictures...