Care Forum - Recent Topics

Random supply and resource links

Nikki Paige — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 21:07:16 +0000

During CARE 2024 I've been collecting a bunch of random links to helpful resources/tools/supplies, and I thought I'd post them here as well. Feel free to add more!

Black Silly Putty from Crazy Aarons

Cobalt Silly Putty from Crazy Aarons

Syracuse Watch Glasses:

Single dishes from Amazon

6-pack from Amazon

12 pack from Fischer Scientific

End cutters/Nippers for snapping otoliths, from Amazon. These are geared for jewelry making and are nice and precise/fine

GIMP photo editor - free, open source photo editing software. Equivalent to Photoshop, including layers (No, I have no idea why it’s named that. But it works!)

And if for some reason you want more (non sparkly) stickers, or the sticker design on any other things (shirts, notebooks, mugs, bags), here’s where you can order them!
CARE Zazzle Shop

(If someone really wants an item with the final otolith in the set “upside down”, I can edit the image file and load it onto any item you’d like on the site)

Skate vertebrae

Andrew Pollak — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 18:10:10 +0000

Hello fellow CARE members. We have some skate vertebrae from a 2010 fishery here in Cook Inlet Alaska. We currently have no plans for them and I would like to get them into the hands of someone who could use them. They were stored in ethanol but have long since dried out and are now stored dry in envelopes. Please reach out if you(or someone you know) could use them for a project or training. I will find out how many we have in the meantime.

Andy

andrew.pollak@alaska.gov

907-235-8191

Putty!

Nikki Paige — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 15:12:04 +0000

I wanted to leave this here for anyone who wanted it - a couple of us labs use Crazy Aaron's Thinking Putty in our sample dishes to hold our otos, and were singing it's praises at CARE. You can get it in large quantites in almost any color you want, and in the past when i wrote a note to them they included hardner to refresh my putty with when it gets too soft.

I love being able to make a water well for looking at surfaces in the same dish as my B&B. Just remember to a) poke a bit of a hole with your tweezers to but the burned oto in, especially if the putty is firm and the oto is small and fragile, and b) put a drop of oil in the hole where you're putting your burnt oto so it doesn't stick.

https://crazyaarons.com/

Microscope options and imaging software

Andrew Pollak — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 23:22:55 +0000

Greeting fellow CARE members,

I am curious about different scopes and pricing. I am current looking for a new scope(for our new age reader!) and got quotes from Leica and Nikon, and while I know they are great scopes from trusted names, they are expensive. Do anyone have any leads on other scopes or vendors that have more reasonable prices?

Second part - What is the current preferred imaging software? We had been using Image Pro Plus. Thanks and It will be nice to see you all again(whenever that mat be!)

Andy

2023 Meeting travel discussion

Nikki Paige — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 18:21:16 +0000

Hey all! Just wanted to start a spot to have some discussion about our upcoming meeting. Personally I'm taking the train up to Seattle, as is my wont, and wanted to see if other peeps know how they're traveling. Mostly so that I know I'll have enough people to bum rides off of from the hotel up to campus in the mornings, since I won't have my own car! 😉

Black rockfish round-robin exchange

melissa.monk — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 23:34:05 +0000

I'm going to use this thread to initiate interest in the black rockfish round-robin exchange before requesting an official CARE exchange number from Andrew.

Please respond if your lab would like to be included and provide the following info:

1. Lab name and contact person for the exchange

2. Do you have 50 black fish to contribute from your state? What is the size range of fish?

3. Is the scientist who aged vermilion rockfish as part of the 2020 round-robin is available to participate in the black rockfish round robin? If we have a few of the same people for both species comparisons that will add insight to the analyses.

4. How many scientists from your lab will age the black rockfish in this exchange?

5. Are there any biogeographical breaks in your state (e.g., Cape Mendocino in CA) that may lead to differences in growth in black rockfish? If yes, do you have 50 structures from each region?

Thanks!

Melissa

p.s. If I don't get any responses here, I'll send out a Google Form :)

Welcome new peeps!

Nikki Paige — Wed, 22 Jun 2022 18:07:50 +0000

@Barb ! Welcome to the board, i've got you set to "registered" so you should be able to read and post with abandon!

Rougheye Rockfish Exchange (2020-2022) between AFSC and ADF&G Juneau

cgburski — Fri, 13 May 2022 22:19:27 +0000

In September 2020, Catherine Matson (ADF&G Juneau) requested a Rougheye Rockfish exchange with AFSC. The CARE Vice-Chair Andrew Claiborne (WDFW Olympia) assigned structure ID numbers for the CASE invoices. A sample of 30 otoliths collected in Region 2 with images from ADFG was sent to AFSC and AFSC sent a sample of 30 otoliths collected from the Gulf of Alaska with images to ADFG. Preparation methods included break and burns and break and bakes. The age reader for ADFG was Catherine and readers from AFSC were Chris Gburski, Betty Goetz and Delsa Anderl. Images were annotated in Photoshop by both ageing labs. An AFSC resolved age was generated by Chris Gburski. Precision results will be posted in the CARE exchange webpage for the 2 exchange sample sets, exchange ID#s 20-004 and 20-005.

Discrepancies between the 2 labs, where specimens were aged >10 years apart, were discussed virtually between AFSC and ADFG on April 6, 2021 for the ADFG sample. Participants were Chris Gburski (AFSC), Delsa Anderl (AFSC), Catherine Matson (ADFG) and Kevin McNeel (ADFG).

Discrepancies between the 2 labs, where specimens were aged >10 years apart, were discussed virtually between AFSC and ADFG on May, 3, 2022 for the AFSC samples. Participants were Chris Gburski (AFSC), Delsa Anderl (AFSC), Catherine Matson (ADFG) and Kevin McNeel (ADFG).

Inter-lab age determination criteria, interpretation of early growth years, ageing axis and ageing precision were reviewed via age reader annotated images with group discussion.

New users, Moderation, and getting in contact

Nikki Paige — Thu, 21 Apr 2022 07:28:08 +0000

Hey all! I just wanted to let you know of a few housekeeping things. I'm moderating the forum, but once I'm back in the office full time and back on my regular desktop computer I won't hear email notifications 24/7 like I have been when working from home. I'll be checking in once a day to answer questions and put out the proverbial fires, but since this is just a side gig and most of my day is spent with my face in the microscope and headphones on so I won't see things as they happen, heh.

To that end, it's possible that a post or comment might get stuck in moderation by the system, and I won't see it to approve it until a little while later. I know this can be frustrating but trust me it's necessary - in the day and a half since the forum has gone live there have been almost *60* spambot accounts created, and a number of spam comments the system has caught and shunted to me to approve or delete. Once a user has posted a few times - I *think* the setting is 5 - the system will stop asking me to approve everything for them.

Thanks everyone for your understanding and patience!

Subscribe question

cgburski — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 21:14:04 +0000

Greetings! I just subscribed to the General Discussion forum. Will I receive an activation email before posts will be seen in my email?

Thanks!

Chris