Last week, I culled all of our one-year-old clams that were around ¾ of an inch or larger and placed them in a separate bucket in the upweller. It was time for these clams to finally get in the mud. When clams grow to this ¾ inch size, they need to grow under pressure. If … Continue reading Seeding Our First Batch Of Clams
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.
One-Year-Old Clams: Growth and Mortality Report
Late in May, I collected and analyzed data on the one-year-old clams before they began feeding and rapidly growing. I was specifically focused on the average clam shell length and the estimated total number of live clams we had in the upweller. Our goal was to compare this data to the data that we collected … Continue reading One-Year-Old Clams: Growth and Mortality Report
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?
Feeding Time
After a long winter, the clams are finally ready to start feeding and growing again. During the winter, the clams were packed together in mesh bags, lying dormant in one of the upweller tanks in the lab. This past week, we cleaned out the second upweller tank and, once filled with sea water, transferred the clams from the mesh bags into five-gallon mesh-bottom buckets where they could spread out while still having access to a constant flow of water.
News Flash! Second Tank is Operational
Late this afternoon, I got word from Mike Pinkham that he and Jim McLean finished setting up and plumbing the new, second tank that we will use to grow clams over the summer in Gouldsboro's Shellfish Resilience Lab. This tank is an essential part of this summer's research program, which will compare growing one-year-old clams … Continue reading News Flash! Second Tank is Operational
Clam Cookbook
Do you have a favorite clam recipe that you would be proud to share with others in town? Maybe a chowder recipe? A clam and sausage stew? Clam risotto or a dynamite clam spaghetti recipe? A luscious baked clams recipe? The Gouldsboro Shore project is putting together a cookbook of clam recipes to show off the skills and imagination of Gouldsboro's cooks. (Winter Harbor's cooks are welcome too!)
Clams and Songs of Love and the Sea
On Friday, May 6, the Gouldsboro Shore Project joins the Winter Harbor Music Festival in presenting “Sirens and Sailors - Songs of Love and the Sea”, a recital ranging from songs of Mozart, Strauss and Rachmaninov to traditional folk, sea shanties, and siren songs. GBshore and WHMF share a commitment to protecting the Schoodic Peninsula’s shoreline and shellfish populations.
Introducing Our 2022 Summer Interns
Gouldsboro, in collaboration with Schoodic Institute, is pleased to announce that Noah Milsky and Hannah Volk have accepted our offers of college student internships for the coming summer. Noah will join the team in late May and Hannah will begin in early June.
New Funding for the Shellfish Lab
Gouldsboro's Shellfish Resilience Lab just received $20,000 from the Maine Shellfish Restoration and Resilience Fund to conduct experiments and collect data to address green crab predation that reduced survival in last summer's cohort of juvenile clams. This post describes what we plan to do.