This morning I went to the lab and picked up buckets and my leftover bait for the traps. I made my rounds picking up traps and collecting the crabs at Seabrook, Hampton, and Newcastle. I also stopped at our trap at the Adam's Point boat launch and our trap on the dock at the Jackson Estuarine Lab. Once all of the traps were emptied I brought all the bucket of crabs from each location into the lab and counted each location's female and male crabs. I looked at the males taken today from the traps to see if any were opaque in color on their ventral side which would be indicative of the imminent phase.The males taken today seemed more pre molt than imminent so I placed them in the big gray bin with the pre molt crabs taken from the traps yesterday. 19 total males were taken today and 2 were bright green so I put them in with the female crabs and released them. Bright green crabs are indicative of a crab that has newly molted. To finish up the day I measured and took pictures of the 8 imminent phase crabs I trapped yesterday and took pictures and measured the 2 remaining crabs from our initial cohort from May 15th. The water temperature in the tank was 13 degrees Celsius today so I was not surprised that no crabs have molted yet. The water comes straight from the estuary outside the lab and it was very cold out today. Optimal temperature for the crabs to molt is about 16 degree Celsius or higher.
