by Katrina Lohan, Smithsonian postdoc

On Friday, we jumped in the boat for a quick ride to a nearby oyster reef just outside the inlet at Wachapreague. Unfortunately for us there was a storm surge of a few feet, so the area that should have been completely exposed at low tide was still mostly underwater. Our boat captain, Edward Smith, took one look around and told us to hurry, as we probably only had one hour to collect all the bivalves we needed.

Edward and two summer interns started to rake for clams, while Michele, Kristy and I headed for oysters and mussels. It was slow going as the water was mucky and the mud was thick. It was a bit of a leg workout!

I collected at one site and then moved on to the next when I heard Michele yell for me that she had cut her leg on an oyster and needed to head back to the boat. She left her collecting bags so Kristy knew where she had been, and she and Kristy switched out at that location. After I had gotten all I needed, I got back to the boat as fast as I could, while still treading slowly and cautiously through the turbid waters. Thankfully, Michele’s cut wasn’t bad and she was able to clean it out with the first aid kit on board. Next time, we are wearing waders!

More stories of oyster and parasite hunting >>

by Katrina Lohan

Rainbow over the marsh at Wachapreague, Va., following a storm. (Katrina Lohan)

It was a little eerie to watch the sky darken and hear the wind, especially when the lights in the lab kept flickering. I contemplated stopping, but I had already dissected all of my samples. It took about 30 more minutes, but I was able to finish up and then we made a mad dash for our rooms in the dormitory. While the power stayed on in the lab, the dorms weren’t so lucky.

As soon as the storm was over, we headed out to dinner at a local restaurant. The view over the marsh was spectacular—rainbows everywhere!

by Katrina Lohan

Microscopic slide of a mussel parasite called a trematode. Trematodes often infect small aquatic animals, like mussels or snails, in hope of getting eaten by a larger host they can infect later. Viewed under 400x magnification. (Katrina Lohan)

Michelle Repetto shucks a hard clam (Mercenaria mercenaria) using a device borrowed from the VIMS Eastern Shore Laboratory. (Katrina Lohan)

by Katrina Lohan

If you have ever tried to open M. mercenaria, then you can fully appreciate that the folks at the ESL gave us a specially designed apparatus just for shucking clams. Even then, the clams we collected were pretty big, so getting them open was really hard.

A co-worker from the Marine Invasions Lab, Michele Repetto, joined Kristy and I on this trip and she has become a master shucker. Between Kristy and Michele’s excellent shucking capabilities, the large clams didn’t stand a chance. Now the mussels on the other hand presented a separate challenge, which was attempting to get them open without destroying the shells, which we are archiving and will eventually submit to the molluscan collection at the National Museum of Natural History.

While I frequently broke the mussel shells into many pieces, Kristy and Michele had the appropriate finesse to open the mussels without causing massive shell damage. Have to enjoy the challenges of working with different species!

by Katrina Lohan

Seaside Hall at the VIMS Eastern Shore Laboratory, where Katrina Lohan and Kristy Hill spent most of their time taking samples from bivalves. (Katrina Lohan)

The end of our field season (if you call half a year a field “season”) is coming to an end as we now head for our sampling location in the Chesapeake Bay. Our northernmost sampling location is Wachapreague, Va., located on the Delmarva Peninsula and home of the Eastern Shore Laboratory (ESL) of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS).

Kristy and I are both alumnae of the College of William and Mary and conducted our graduate research at VIMS. For my Ph.D., all of my fieldwork was conducted at the ESL, so returning as a postdoc, working on a different disease system, is a little surreal for me. It has been nice to catch up with the folks at this lab and see the new buildings, which were still in preparation when I graduated. How time flies!

Before venturing out on this particular trip, we contacted our collaborator Ryan Carnegie of the Shellfish Pathology Lab at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science to get some suggestions about sampling location. He suggested sampling oyster reefs at Mockhorn Channel just off Oyster, Va., as they had historical data from that area. The folks at the ESL knew just where to take us and we headed out on Tuesday to collect.

In previous locations we aimed to collect three oyster species. However, there is only one oyster in the Chesapeake Bay: Crassostrea virginica, the eastern oyster. So we decided to collect other bivalves: the ribbed mussel (Geukensia demissa) and the hard clam (Mercenaria mercenaria).

Our boat captain, Edward Smith, suggested that we split up so that we could complete the collection prior to the tide coming in. I ended up on the high marsh searching for mussels, which was super muddy and, consequently, lots of fun! It was beautiful weather and just windy enough that the bugs stayed away. Once all the mussels and oysters were collected, we all headed to a mud flat to rake for clams. I have to admit that I am horrible at finding clams. While Edward found more than 30 clams, I found three….Good thing that others were better than me or we would never have found enough. Then it was back to the lab to figure out how to shuck them all!