The Oyster Monitoring Program (OMP) was developed in 2001 by the Department of Fisheries, Aquaculture, and Rural Development (DFARD) to provide fishermen with the essential information needed to harvest shellfish, specifically oysters and mussels, sustainably in Prince Edward Island Canada (PEI) (Burleigh et al., 2012). The program collects information such as water temperature, shellfish larvae concentration and size, and tunicate density from approximately late May to early September using various sampling techniques (Burleigh et al., 2012). There are 33 sites, however, not all sites were sampled each year so the data lacks consistency (Burleigh et al., 2012). Our study manipulated data from the OMP to investigate the relationships between ocean water temperatures, tunicate larvae density, and mussel larvae size. Numerous studies have noted the significant impact that temperature and invasive or competing organisms can have on mussel productivity. In our study we chose to use mussel larvae size as a measure of productivity since this characteristic is an aspect of population growth and mortality which therefore, influences productivity (Lowe et al., 2017). Additionally, the program collected data on both mussels and oysters but failed to differentiate between the two within their data. As a result this study will use the term mussels when referring to both mussels and oysters. Based on our results we can determine that both tunicate larvae density and mussel larvae productivity increase with water temperature independently over the growing season. Due to limitations in the sampling design and data available, we were unable to determine any effect of tunicate larvae density or temperature on mussel productivity within PEI. Although there are numerous studies that have analyzed the relationships between mussels, temperature, and tunicate density, providing an understanding of these relationships within the local scale will determine if the expected interactions are true as well as help guide the PEI Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Aquaculture on current and potential management strategies.
Picture citation: (Balsam, 2021)
Disclaimers:
- This website and study was completed for a course project for RenR 480: Applied Statistics for the Environmental Science at the University of Alberta 2022
- When the term "mussels" is used throughout this website, it is referring to both mussels and oysters. This is due to the fact that the OMP collected oyster and mussel data but failed to differentiate between them when recording data.