First Manchester Sampling

Today we went out to NOAA’s Manchester Facility to sample our oysters before placing them in our ocean acidification system! We collected length and weight information for twenty oysters, and extracted adductor, ctenidia (gill), mantle and gonad tissues. Gonad tissue was put in histology cassettes and then placed in fixatives.

Data sheet

Here are some photos from our time at Manchester!

Getting excited to shuck Pacific oysters as large as my face!

We layed out each oyster to weigh, measure and extract tissue.

Some of the oysters were so large we had to hammer them open.

Once open, we extracted four tissue types. Then we removed the body and reweighed the empty shell.

These are the histology cassettes we used to hold gonad samples. Pictured here are the samples for the Olympia oysters. The Pacific oyster samples were tissue pieces, as opposed to the whole gonad.

Megan, Laura and Olivia working on Olympia oysters!

Dead oysters are gross.

Meanwhile, Steven worked on setting up some plumbing.

Overall it was an extremely productive day! We’ll be back out on Feb. 8 to set up the ocean acidification system.