Dataset: Ocean Acidification Experiment: Water Quality

These data water quality readings for oysters exposed to ocean acidification at multiple timepoints over an 80 day period. The experiment was conducted in the summer of 2017 at the Northeastern University's Marine Science Center with a flow-through seawater system that draws water from Broad Sound in Nahant, Massachusetts (42.416884, −70.907564) using oysters collected from Plum Island Sound, Massachusetts, USA (Site 1, 42.751636, −70.837023; Site 2, 42.725186, −70.855022; Site 3, 42.681764, −70.813498) in late April.

Water Chemistry: Temperature, pH, and salinity of all tanks were measured three times per week (M,W, and F) for the duration of the experiment. Seawater pH was measured with an Accumet solid state pH electrode (precision = 1 mV) calibrated with pH 7.01 and pH 10.01 NBS buffers (for calibration slope) and Dickson seawater Certified Reference Material (for calibration intercept). Complete carbonate chemistry was determined for each tank every 2 weeks. In brief, seawater samples were collected every 2 weeks in 250 ml borosilicate ground-glass stoppered bottles sealed with vacuum grease from each tank and immediately poisoned with 100 μl saturated HgCl2 solution, then refrigerated until analysis of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) and total alkalinity (TA) was performed. DIC, TA, salinity, and temperature were used to calculate calcite saturation state, pH, CO2−3, HCO−3, aqueous CO2, and pCO2 of each sample using CO2SYS version 2.1 (Pierrot et al., 2011).