Three Graces: part 2

A scallop shucking party!

By the time I crawled into bed, it was 1 am. I thought about going straight to the lab, but I would have ended up napping on the couch. There was no way I could start processing my samples right away - in my exhausted state, mistakes were a real risk, and I didn't want to mess up the samples I had just worked so hard to collect. If I was going to nap, I may as well nap at home. 

When the alarm went off at 7, the first thing I did was text my lab group. "Good morning," I wrote to Kharis and Johanna, "if you want free, fresh scallops, show up at WHOI and help me shuck." 

It was actually a lot of fun. My husband, Carl, my student, Kharis, my postdoc, Johanna, and Johanna's husband all lined up at the lab bench. I had bought a couple shucking knives, and Kharis brought a few tools of her own from home. Carl and Kharis worked out an effective technique for separating the adductor muscle (the scallop "meat") from the rest of the guts and the shells. We were very careful with the shells - I needed them for science. Every shell had to be kept together at the hinge, and scallops from different stations were sorted into color-coded bins. I let the shells dry in the sun for a bit before sealing them up for storage. I'll spend some time over the next few months analyzing the growth rings in all the scallop shells we collected. 

Poor Kraken. No scallops for him.

While everyone else shucked, I filtered water. The water samples I had collected at sea will be used to measure chlorophyll concentrations as a proxy for primary productivity at each station. I set up a vacuum pump and poured seawater slowly over a filter, then let the vacuum suck the water down into a beaker below. I had to keep track of the bottle numbers and label each filter with the station that the sample came from. Filtering water is actually pretty slow work - you pour a little water, wait for it to filter through, pour, wait, repeat. It would have been pretty boring if I didn't have the shucking party to keep me company. 

Probably the saddest creature in the lab that day was my dog, Kraken. We had to move the scallop waste bucket onto the lab bench because he got a little too curious about it. So much seafood, and none of it for him. Poor Kraken. 

Back at home, my husband made a new dish that he called Science Risotto. I'm grateful for the samples I collected and the scallop meats we got to enjoy!