Post #11 - Bumpy road

The island's roads have their share of bumps, but on average are pretty smooth.  The same can be said for our avenue of research here, though for the past few days the "road" has seemed like it's full of potholes!   The aquarium room has 12 tanks, and for each we try to control the temperature and the amount of CO2 bubbling into the water to influence the pH - the more CO2, the more acidic the water becomes.  (I'll post pictures of the tanks later....)  We can't run our COT experiments if the pH is not within certain limits, and Emily also needs to have some of the tanks at a slightly higher temperature for her coral larvae experiments.  (Her corals should begin releasing their larvae after next Wednesday's new moon and continue for about 7-10 days, so we need to have everything working before then.)  Well, two days ago the high CO2 tanks' pH values were off, and the chiller that helps regulate the temperatures wasn't working right - so trouble shooting all day and no COT experiments.  Yesterday, the pH values were good so we ran TWO COT experiments, starting in the lab around 7 a.m. and finishing preserving the last tubes of embryos at 11:30 p.m.

We had planned on running another COT experiment this morning, but alas, the pH values were off again because the air mixture pumps shut off unexpectedly overnight.  After the pumps were working again, it took until this evening for the pH values to get to where we needed them.  So today was another day of no COT experiments, but of spending hours looking through a microscope analyzing the embryos of the past few experiments, making a very quick SCUBA dive to collect a water sample next to the SeaFET, installing another chiller in the aquarium room, doing many pH measurements, and getting ready to do two COT fertilization experiments tomorrow assuming the pH values in the tanks will be where we need them.

There's progress every day, it's just not always what is planned!

Enough of that....  Here are some pictures for you:

These COT always amaze me!

Collecting carefully!  (My finger that was injured over two weeks ago is mostly healed but still sore.)

Coral reefs are cornucopias of colorful animals.  Here is a "giant clam" (this little one is about 4" across) with its mantle (the tissue that secretes the shell) a beautiful blue.

However, clams, like people, show variation......

One of my favorite animals is the nudibranch, sometimes called a sea slug.  These can be spectacularly colored, and are fun to find though at times they can be very cryptic.  However, this 6" guy was not hard to spot; it was right out in the open.

All the pictures in today's post were taken a week ago by Viv Cumbo, a post-doc from CSUN that graciously shared her great pictures with me.