 Alright, my name is Bill Walton. I'm with Auburn University Shellfish Lab in Alabama Cooperative Extension, and we wanted to show folks one way that we use here at the Shellfish Lab for determining the total number of seed that you have gotten. It's time of year right now when people oyster growers are getting deliveries of seed and they have ordered a certain amount, paid for a certain amount, and they want to know if that is in fact the amount that they got. Certainly your seed supplier will give you an estimate of what they're delivering. They are going to try to deliver on whatever number that you ordered. We recommend that you go ahead and estimate the total number on your own. That's not because you're necessarily doubting what the seed supplier is doing, but what we do want to do is make sure that you have an accurate inventory from the start. So we're going to show you the weighing method. There are other methods out there for determining how many seed, for example, are in this bag. One would be splitting. We spread all these seed out, start dividing it in half, and then half again, half again, half again, until we get down to sizes we could count. There's wet pack volume. We'll share a link for that. There's volumetric displacement, which we often use at the lab when we're doing studies where we need a great deal of precision. We think that that is probably a fairly accurate method, but there are a lot of ways to make mistakes with that. So the method that we recommend that most people use, and the one that we use routinely here at the lab, is the weighing method. So you do need a couple things. You do need a scale that can measure this total volume. You're going to need a scale that can handle much smaller weights and do that accurately. I'll cover that a little bit here. The other thing you're going to have to think about is the size seed that you have. We think about what size they retain on. These are our sixes. They retain on a six millimeter, which means they're substantially larger than six millimeters. I would say that typically measuring or using this method for something that is smaller than retained on a two can be done, but would require a lot of extra care to be sure that you're accurate. There are also some decisions you're going to have to make before you start. When you look at this, what are you counting? Are you counting live singles? What are you going to do with doubles in here? What are you going to do with triples if you have some of those? We only count live singles, but you would want to check with your seed supplier to see how they handled that. Did they count doubles? Did they count doubles as one or did they count them as two? I'll show you that. You want to think about how many samples you want to take, and so part of that is how much counting you want to do. But you also want to look at the grade of the seed. These are very well-sorted. These were actually just sorted yesterday, so they're all about the same size. So we could get away with fewer samples in this and probably be pretty accurate. If you had a mix of sizes in here, that's going to increase your variability, so you're going to want to take more subsamples. You're also going to decide what units you're using, and I know that most people are used to pounds and ounces, but converting pounds and ounces when you're multiplying up can get really complicated. So we really typically use the metric system just because the multiplication is so much simpler. So here, let's get started. I'm going to turn on this large scale. This is a scale that can get wet. But you can use any large scale, but you do want to be careful about how precise this is. I'm going to convert this to metric, as I mentioned. So it's going to be in kilograms, and this goes out to actually not just tenths or hundreds, but actually thousands of a kilogram. So you can have containers. In this case, these seeds are not going to fit in one bucket. So I'm going to zero out this bucket. So I've got a zero weight for this. And then, by the way, when you do this, some mistakes that you can make, you can see there's some water in this. And actually, I don't want to weigh the water because the water is not part of the weight of the seed. So actually, I'll take this bucket down, make this easier, and I'll pour some of these seed into this bucket. Not to lose any of those seeds. Remember I had the weight of the bucket already taken out, so right now I'm just going to get the first weight, which is, I'm going to convert this to grams because I think grams is easier. So it's 8,495 grams for that first bucket. Put that aside. I'm going to zero out the second bucket. Sometimes you want to just, you're tempted to assume that these buckets weigh the same, but it's easy enough to just zero out the second bucket and then add seed to that, we find. One of the things you'll see, we've got some scientific scales here. Certainly that's great if you can get them, but we have done this with scales that you can pick up at supermarkets or other types of office stores. Again, you're going to be looking at the precision of that. So let's get this. Alright, in this case, once it settles down, it looks like 7,045 grams. So I will add those up for you and figure out the total weight in a minute. What has to happen now is we've gotten the total weight of the seed, and so it's going to be somewhere around, right around 15,500 or so grams. Let's take a look at what we need to do next, which is do some sub-samples. So again, you don't need anything fancy. I've just taken some of our cups for drinking water here. I'm putting it on a scale. Now this scale will go out to, this is measuring grams, and this will go out to hundreds of a gram. What you don't want to do is use a scale like this, because what's going to happen is when it gets out to those hundreds of a kilogram, it's going to jump up by big amounts when you're measuring these sub-samples, because we don't want to count a whole lot of oysters. So I've got sample number one here. I'm just going to reach in. I'm trying not to bias it. I'm just trying to get some oysters. Well, how many am I putting in? I'm not counting them when I put them in. I'm just trying to get a handful that I think it's reasonable to count. So I'm guessing that's over 30 oysters, and we would recommend typically that you use at least 30 oysters in it. I'm going to put that on here, and here's what happens now. For this first sample, I know the sample weight, which is 14.4 grams. I'm going to put that aside, and I'm going to, now that I know that weight, I'm going to be able to do a count of the live singles, and I'll show you that in a minute. Let me then zero out the next cup. Remember, we're zeroing out each time. Once it reaches zero, sometimes it jumps around a little bit. Again, I'm going to reach into the other bucket, because I'm not trying to bias it necessarily by which bucket I'm reaching into. In this case, I've got 16.29 grams for sample number two. And you can imagine what I'm going to do is I'm going to walk through here doing the next three samples that I've got, samples three through five. I'm going to grab handfuls of oysters. Here's number three. Because I want to make sure I'm not missing some on the bottom here, that might be a different size, I'm going to grab handfuls from different parts of the bucket, put them in there, try to get a reasonable amount. What's an unreasonable amount? You have to decide, but if we start counting 200 oysters or more in a sample, we think that's probably too many. We're trying to get something in there, and you'll get a practiced eye for that. So the third sample here is going to be 17.30. And then I will just do the next two samples, and we'll get those up on the board for you. Okay, I've got the five samples. I've got random samples of oysters in each one, and I've got a total weight for each sample. So now it's coming down to counting. So what we do is we typically make sure all the oysters are out so that we've got everything that was weighed in here. That might include doubles, that might include dead oysters. That's okay because the total sample included those as well. We want that. We want whatever's in this to be representative of what was in the total samples. And so now we're going to go through this, and we're going to count live single oysters. And so the only thing I would recommend is when you're doing something like this, is be very careful here, because small errors here will multiply up. So, for example, I've got oysters that are damp. They're still wet. And so because of that, they're sticking together a little bit. So I'm actually flipping the oysters over to make sure that there isn't one hiding. In that case, there was an oyster hiding under the other one. I just want to make sure I'm getting an accurate count. So I'm going to count these out. If I get any doubles, I'm going to move them to the side. I don't have to count them, but I don't want to count them. As I said, here at the Shellfish Lab, we only count live singles. So we're just going to get a count of our live singles. Anything else, we can just move to the side. It won't be counted, but again, it was part of the total weight. So I'm going to go ahead, and with some colleagues here, we're going to get these oysters counted out, and we'll get the counts up on the board for you. Okay, we have gone ahead and gotten counts out of each of these cups. And remember, there are numbers on each cup so that we know what count of live singles goes with which cup, which means we know it goes with which weight. So there is an app for this. We have an oyster farming app that you can download. It's free, and it has a calculator for this, but I'm going to walk through here of what we've done. So in that first sample, we got a count of 69 live singles, and it was in 14.4 grams. We can do the math on that, and you can do that with a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet, or again, you can use the app. But what we're going to basically do is take the total number of live singles and divide it by that sample weight, and then multiply it by this total sample weight. That's how much everything weighed when we put it all together. And that gives us an estimate of the total number of live singles. So you can see in that first sample, if we just did one sample, our best guess was that there were 24,463 animals total in that bag that we had delivered. But we take another sample, and you can see even though we had a higher weight, we actually got the same number of oysters, and so that just shows some of the variability that you get. And because there were the same number of oysters in a larger weight sample, it actually predicts that there would be only 65,823 oysters, live single oysters in that sample. And anyway, you can repeat this as we have done. We did this five times. The app lets you go up to six, but if you want to do more, certainly you can do that with a calculator or an Excel spreadsheet. And you can see that we got five different estimates of the total number of live oysters in this. When you average those, it comes out to that our best estimate of the total number of oysters that were delivered in that purple bag that we started with was 75,548 oysters. But because we've done multiple samples, we can actually put some air bars around that. And so with 95% confidence, we can say that we're pretty sure it's around 75,548 animals, but it's probably between 70,647 and 80,448. That just gives you an idea that, again, this is an estimate. We're not counting each oyster. And so this is going to give us some range that we're in for this. We do advise certainly that you keep all these records either in the app, you can send it to yourself. If you have a dispute with the seed supplier, certainly I would share all the numbers that you have and the method that you used to do this and talk with that person about how they came to their numbers because it may come down to simply some differences in how it was done and maybe some different assumptions about the doubles or the singles and how they were counted. So again, even if you don't decide to dispute the number of seed that you got, we recommend that it is important as an oyster farmer that you know how many oysters you're starting with. So if you were expecting 90,000 oysters in that delivery and your estimate is that there were only around 75,500 in change, again, you'd have to decide if you want to dispute that, but certainly for your own inventory purposes, you would want to know that your best estimate of where you started was at that 75,000 mark. I think with that, that is what we've got for this. Please do check out some other videos, including the ones about how to use that oyster farming app if you'd like to use it for this. That would also let you do some cool things like deciding if you wanted to stock baskets at a certain density, it's got a calculator to take the numbers that you have just generated here to help you decide how many to put into an oyster bag.