Setting up salt water tanks

Now that we have a few rooms in the basement of Phillips Hall (and I have a little bit of time), we are going to try to set up a couple of salt water tanks. I'd like to try to keep the sea squirt Ciona savigny in the lab and use it to measure fluid flow induced by cilia and contractions through the siphon and body. We're going to try to do this using particle image velocimetry (piv). Hopefully, the flash of the laser will not startle them. It may also be a challenge to keep them alive. They need moving water and a constant supply of food (it is harder than it sounds). If all works out, eventually I'd like to work up to taking measurements of flow rates in their heart and blood vessels.

The next step is going to be to keep some jellyfish alive in the lab. This should be more exciting for students and visitors since they actually swim! The problem is that these animals do not do well with walls. They have a tendency to slam into them and get stuck. Supposedly, cylindrical tanks with a jet that flows around the wall can keep them in the center of the tank and happy. If we can get this to work, we should be able to get spatially and temporally resolved flow fields as they swim. John Dabiri at Caltech has gotten excellent data from these animals already. Hopefully we can reproduce some of the work as an outreach tool.