Sunday, February 21, 2010

Welcome Walt Rogers

We have a new undergraduate lab technician, Walt Rogers, who is joining us from the Dept. of Marine Sciences. Walt is currently working on redesigning the tanks. He's doing a great job of feeding and maintaining the tanks, and he seems to have some good ideas for tank design.

The algae in the newest tank turned out to actually be a very neat-looking and apparently very toxic blue-green algae. We also had a nice diatom bloom to go with it. Together these two managed to kill all of the jellyfish and most of the snails in the tank. The anemones, serpent star, and crab seem to be okay. We're going to play musical tanks and try to clean everything as we go. I'm not sure whether the live rock has been contaminated, so I'm a little trepidatious about transferring it once the new tank is set up.

It will take a while to get the tanks up and running for jellyfish, so experiments have been put on hold for a while. I don't know what this means for my project, but for now I'm just working on numerical simulations and math modeling. Hopefully once the tanks are up again, I'll be able to get lots of data from the next batch of jellies.

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