Oysters Galore

Hello everybody,

The past two weeks have been pretty crazy at work! I started helping out with a project for a Master's student which involves baby oysters. The processing started to get pretty complex due to the size of the baby oysters - they're about the size of my pinky nail! Shucking them was not an easy task, nor was blending them to produce a homogenate we could work with! We had to get creative but we were able to produce a protocol that works.

I've also been doing lots of coding with years of plankton and Vibrio spp. data, which has been a great learning experience. Coding is complicated and has a steep learning curve, but I feel that I'm starting to get the hang of it.

Yesterday we went out on the Great Bay again for Surveillance and collected lots of oysters, sediment, water, and plankton. Today I streaked the bacteria that we grew onto ChromAgar plates and tomorrow we will observe the colors of the colonies that grew and move those onto new agar for further isolation so that they can be used for molecular work at the end of this week!

All is well in the land of oysters!
-Audrey

Vegetation Monitoring, bugs and More !

These have been a busy last few weeks! Over this time I have found myself helping out with a kid's summer camp at the Coastal Marine lab doing fish printing, collecting crabs for a fellow Doyle Intern's project, beach monitoring and going on a Great Bay Cruise. Even with all these other events going on, I found time to go out and collect all the necessary vegetation data in the Seabrook Dunes for my project. In addition to monitoring the plant community, my boss Alyson proposed an interesting idea which was to sample the insect population as well. Neither of us are entomologists so this was very new to us both. I researched a number of methods of sampling insect populations and decided upon the pitfall trap method. I won't bore you with the fine details but essentially I chose areas within my plots to bury SOLO cups which would capture any unlucky insect who walked close enough to fall in. I found a wide variety of spiders, flies and other insects that I had no idea lived in the dunes! Overall this summer has been very interesting and informative and I look forward to putting together my final dune monitoring report.

Green Crab Hunt with a Summer Camp

Hi Everyone,

This week was fun because I got to help some kids attending a camp at the New England Aquarium do some stuff with green crabs!  On Wednesday, the camp, which is an environmental/marine based camp, came to the Jackson lab (where I work out of).  I was working outside, sorting a crate of female green crabs. They were supposed to be doing things with oysters on Wednesday but as they walked by, they saw the crabs I was going through, and some of the kids became more interested with the crabs than with the oysters!  I made some friends who decided they didn't want to deal with the oysters and just play with the crabs instead. 

The next day, Gabby, Mark, and I led a green crab hunt with the same camp at Pierce Island! We all split into groups and the friends I had made from the day before were great helpers as we searched for crabs!  All in all, we ended up finding almost 200 green crabs in total and about 20 softies (soft shell crabs)! We ended up giving the soft shelled crabs to the Joinery, a restaurant nearby, and hopefully they end up on the specials menu for the weekend! We shall see!

~Nicole

Changing It Up A Little

Hello!

This week I am blogging about a little change of pace in my work day.  Today, I, along with my boss Gabby, went over to my fellow intern's house (Mark) and learned how to make crates to keep the crabs in once we catch them!  Mark is a part-time lobsterman so he makes crates like these for traps for his lobsters, so he has all the knowledge and power tools to make them efficiently.  We use a wire/mesh type material to cut, bend, and pin together to make a crate that holds 18 or 36 (depending on the size) crabs in it separately at once.  We like to call it "crab condos." :) We put them in this type of housing to monitor them when we think they might be getting close to molting.  It makes it easy for us to quickly check on them and note when anything happens.

So, we spent the entire morning cutting the pieces to fit what and where we needed using this air pressurized wire cutter (quite fun once you get the hang of it).  Then we used this big wire bender to bend the wire to make sides for the crates.  Then we used these industrially strong staples to bend around the different parts of the crates to hold them together.  That was my favorite part...for some reason it was relaxing for me!  I have to admit though, it was hard work and there were lots of sore hands and arms after they were all done!  We celebrated by going to a new restaurant that just opened (in Kittery, ME) by Mark's house.  It was very cute and the food was tasty and one of my favorite parts was that the to-go box they gave me was 100% biodegradable and made from natural fibers!  So, overall it was a good day, and we might end up going back and making more crates if we find we like how they work!

~Nicole

Post-Presentation

Hello again, everybody!

Yesterday I gave a presentation to the other Cooperative Extension interns on my project/internship thus far. I also got to listen to presentations from the other interns and learn about what they've been working on!

I get very nervous giving presentations, so naturally I was anxious. However, it went well and I only got a little bit flustered! The audience seemed interested in my work and asked questions about shucking oysters, blending them into a "smoothie" for processing (see the picture below!), and if swimmers need to be concerned about Vibrio-related illnesses around here.

I've also been doing some research on ways to analyze microbial communities in oysters for a potential upcoming experiment... very exciting! Being a microbiologist, learning about all of the bacteria I can work with as well as ways to analyze them is thrilling!

Until next time!
Audrey