Water Sampling

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The protocol for collecting water samples for the BioOce project

The purpose of taking water samples is to measure local environmental variability relative to where oysters were sampled from The protocol below is based on sampling from three sites, sampled approximately once per month

Materials

  • 3 50 mL Falcon Tubes

  • 3 glass bottles from the Ries Lab

  • A styrofoam cooler with ice

  • Digital thermometers or PreSens

  • Field notebook

Prep

  1. Grab three glass bottles from the Ries Lab. You’ll need card access for this. Grab the large bottles unless there aren’t any clean

  2. For the three glass bottles, you need glass stoppers with grease applied to them. Stoppers are in the plastic bottles

  3. Gently wipe grease off glass stoppers with a paper towel, and put a conservative amount of new grease on them (the grease is expensive; it can be found in drawer to right of sink). Place into bottles and rotate

  4. Make sure there is no resistance when rotating stoppers in bottles, if there is, add more grease

  5. Label them with a sharpie or one of the EtOH proof pens (typically LOCATION and DATE go on each bottle: ex, IpswichLIV 2017-01-25)

  6. Store all tubes on ice. Ice is in gel room

Sampling

  1. Start at Rowley SI site

  2. Go into shallow water, about mid-calf in depth

  3. Let temperature gauges sit freely in water while taking water samples

  4. Rinse bottle three times with salt water, then gently fill the bottle by making opening parallel to water surface Minimize the creation of bubbles when you are filling the glass bottles

  5. As bottle begins to fill, slowly submerge lower end to continue filling bottle Leave about 1cm between the glass stopper and the the top of the water

  6. Repeat with falcon tube

  7. Store bottles on ice between sites and when traveling back to the MSC

Repeat at each site

Upon returning to MSC

  1. Poison glass bottle samples with mecuric chloride (This is located in the Ries lab fume hood on the left, for a small glass bottle it takes 100ul or 200ul for larger bottles of the solution in the falcon tubes)

  2. Place bottles in the Ries lab freezer with other samples Be careful not to get mecuric chloride on the outside of the glass bottles or caps (since we handle them without gloves when we eventually run them on the VINDTA) Therefore, take out stoppers, use mecuric chloride, dispose of gloves, and restopper