Last week, Mike Pinkham and I spent a few days constructing five nursery trays that our small seed clams would soon be placed in. A nursery tray is a rectangular wooden tray about 3-4 feet in length and width, and about 3 inches high. The bottom and top of each tray is made of a … Continue reading Nursery Trays are Floating
Two-Month-Old Clam Growth Update
In order for the clam lab to be cost effective, it is important that our clam population has a high survival rate as well as a typical growth rate. The good news is, most of our two-month-old clams have survived up to this point. The bad news is, their growth rate is significantly slower than … Continue reading Two-Month-Old Clam Growth Update
One-Year-Old Clams: It’s Time For The Mud
Since my time here, I have learned just how unpredictable it is to raise soft-shell clams in an upweller. Right when you think you have things under control, a new problem arises. We have been working hard, attempting to solve issues ranging from identifying and controlling harmful species in our upwellers, to water flow inconsistencies, … Continue reading One-Year-Old Clams: It’s Time For The Mud
Tunicate Trouble
Every other day, I hose down the one-year-old clams and their mesh-bottom buckets with salt water. As I was rinsing and washing these buckets, I saw an increasing number of unfamiliar organisms attached to the one-year-old clams. After discussing these organisms with the Downeast Institute (DEI) as well as the Department of Marine Resources (DMR), … Continue reading Tunicate Trouble
Water Level and Upweller Flow
The flow of water through the upweller is different for each of the three buckets pictured at right. You can tell by the amount of sediment on the clams. The clams in the bucket on the left are pretty clean, the ones in the bucket on the right are covered with silt and other organic matter, and the ones in the middle are, well, in the middle.
Lab Water Temperatures: What’s Going On?
The graph that you see at the top of this post shows the water temperatures in the shellfish lab's two tanks from 3 PM on June 5 to 3 PM today, June 12. Since the tanks get water from the same pump, the temperatures go up and down together. That's always been true until today. Between 2 and 3 AM, the temperature in Tank 2 began increasing slowly and started dropping in Tank 1. Then, at 7 AM, Tank 1 started warming quickly while Tank 2 continued its gradual increase. By 3:30 PM, there was a four-degree difference between the tanks! What was going on?