The Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies

I’m a senior at the University of South Carolina majoring in Environmental Science with a minor in Data Science. This summer, I worked with my mentor Dr. Craig Norrie — a postdoc in the Padilla-Gamiño lab at the UW School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences — to study the impacts of climate change stressors on farmed oysters in Puget Sound.

The Pacific oyster (Crassotrea gigas) is an ecologically and economically important species that makes up a large portion of Washington’s shellfish aquaculture industry. Rising seawater temperatures, ocean acidification, and hypoxia pose threats to the coastal environments where these oysters are grown. Particularly during the summer months, excess heat stress and coastal upwelling of acidified waters lead to widespread physiological stress and mortality among farmed oysters in Puget Sound. Oxygen consumption rate serves as a useful indicator of stress response. Upregulated metabolic rates may mean that oysters need to allocate more energy toward maintaining homeostasis, while a drop in metabolic rate can indicate an oyster is in metabolic depression, a short-term strategy to tolerate stress. My project looks at the variation in respiration rates across different sites, which represented a range of environmental conditions, over the course of the summer.

During my time at UW, I had the chance to do fieldwork at four oyster farms around Puget Sound, which was a lot of fun and taught me important lessons in adaptability. We visited each site once a month to track growth and mortality, collect environmental data, and bring back oysters for respirometry analysis. I also learned a variety of lab skills while completing that respirometry and analyzing the carbonate chemistry of our seawater samples. Getting a sense of what the research process is really like was an enormously valuable experience, and I learned a ton about myself over these nine weeks.

My work was part of Craig’s ongoing project in collaboration with researchers at NOAA PMEL and local shellfish growers. The field study will continue to monitor the effects of environmental variation on farmed oysters in situ, complemented by some forthcoming laboratory experiments which will shed light on oysters’ responses to stressors in a more controlled setting. One of the products of this project will be a decision tool to help growers evaluate their farms’ vulnerability to climate change and choose what variety of oysters to plant at a given time and place.

I’m deeply grateful to everyone at CICOES who made this awesome program possible, to the REU cohort who made the summer unforgettable, and to Nick and Craig who were a joy to work with and learn from.

Project Description

Research Poster