SSEP Blog – Ballston Spa, NY

Ms. Irwin received a phone call from NCESSE at 8:00 pm yesterday.  Earlier that afternoon, ITA informed NCESSE that the climate control in their laboratory failed.  They don’t know if the failure was due to the snow storm this week, but because of the storm ITA could not get it repaired rapidly. They therefore had no choice but to reschedule the SSEP STS-134 Fluid/Sample Compatibility Test scheduled to take place today for approximately one week.  We now had to determine what to do about our samples.  We have three choices:

A) Refrigerate the samples at 4 degrees Celsius until the test can be conducted.
B) Store the samples at room temperature until the test can be conducted.
C) Send new samples by the close of business on January 4th.

At a temperature of 22 degrees C the tilapia eggs will hatch in 5 days.  Even if AmeriCulture sent eggs from the harvest of the remaining tanks on today,  the eggs would be after the 5 day hatching time table by the time the test was started.  AmeriCulture probably won’t be harvesting again until January 6^th.  At a temperature lower than 20 degrees C the Tilapia eggs will have a high level of mortality.  However,  the eggs do not need to be alive for the test but do need to still be eggs.  Based on this we decided to go with storage at 4 degrees C.  We are expecting most if not all of the eggs to die but they will still be eggs and should still have the composition required for the test.

We received word at 1:30 pm today that our eggs arrived at ITA at 9:30 am.  We met the deadline for the samples to arrive at ITA for the fluids and compatibility test.  Yeah!  We are hearing a possibility that there may be issues with the test.

We received three phone calls from Americulture today as they pulled 100,000 eggs two days early so that they could ship roughly 50 eggs to ITA for our fluids and compatibility test.  We are so appreciative of all of their help.   The box shipped at 5:00 pm our time and weighed 29 pounds.

Dana, Kate, and Jordyn collected the sample of water from the fish tank in Ms. Otten’s room so that it could be shipped to ITA for the fluids and compatibility test.

ITA changed the schedule from starting the test on 12/30 to starting the test on 12/29.  The samples now have to arrive by the end of the day on 12/28.  They have agreed to make an exemption for our eggs to arrive the morning of 12/29.

We received word that the materials for fluids and compatibility test need to be at ITA by December 29th, not the 27th.  AmeriCulture feels much better about meeting this deadline.  They are going to pull the eggs from one of their tanks on December 28th, 2 days early so that they can meet the deadline.  The eggs will be shipped overnight with an early am arrival time.  This means that there  is a greater chance that the eggs will survive and not have hatched by the time the test starts than if we had to ship the eggs on December 23rd.

AmeriCulture in Santa Fe, NM  said that they would be able to provide Tilapia eggs for us for both the fluids and compatibility test as well as the actual experiment.  We are so excited.  At the same time we also received an email from Blue Ridge Aquaculture that they could help.  Thank you to all of the people around the country that have been helping us find eggs.

We received a voice message from the contact that Cornell University provided us in Santa Fe, NM.  Were were really hopeful about this possibility.  It was too late to call today but we would definitely call tomorrow.

We received an email response from Tilapia Farming at Home.  Edgar would have helped but he was in the process of moving his Tilapia Farm.

We were able to connect with the USDA contact in Florida.  He was able to provide two contacts for people that might be able to provide Tilapia eggs.  He also at least provided us with the feeling that there were enough people raising Tilapia and that the eggs would be easy enough to attain that we might be able to meet the fluids and compatibility test deadline.  We continued to network. 

One of the people that we contacted yesterday sent us an email indicating that a contact of theirs in Florida could arrange for us to obtain clown fish (NEMO) eggs for our experiment.  Unfortunately, we had to turn down their offer of assistance.  We had already submitted the final materials list at 10:00 am this morning.  In addition, since clown fish (NEMO) are salt water fish, we felt it was really changing our experiment too much.  We wanted to stay with freshwater fish.

We let our contact at Cornell Univeristy know that we still hadn’t heard from the contact in Santa Fe.   He indicated that once we were able to connect, he was 99.9% sure they would be able to come through for us.