New jellyfish are here, and sea squirts too!

We finally got in our jellyfish orders and they appear to be happy in our aquaria! We have the tank next to the window so that they are getting both natural and artificial light. We've also added sea squirts to the tank this time around with the hopes that they will keep the algae under control. Stay tuned for some pictures and movies.

Or maybe not

We were contacted last week that there would be no new jellies due to a death in the family of the suppliers. Invertebrate suppliers are usually locally owned, small-scale operations so this is not unexpected. The new shipment looks to arrive around the 27th. We'll be waiting!

New Jellies

We should be getting in some new jellyfish today. Most people are going out of town next week, so it's good we can get them nice and settled before we leave. Megan is doing an outstanding job of taking care of the tanks.

Welcome Megan Gyoerkoe

We have a brand new lab tech, Megan Gyoerkoe!

Megan will be wrangling with the jellyfish for the summer. So far she's been working on removing the algae from the walls of some of the older tanks in preparation for the arrival of some new jellyfish and tunicates. She's done a great job so far, hopefully we'll be able to convince her to stay in the fall!

We're hoping to be able to handle a new shipment some time next week. I'll try to post some pictures of the tanks in their current states.

We're in our new home of Chapman 303 for now and we're enjoying the joys of a sink. It looks like there will be construction going on in Chapman during which we may have to relocate to Phillips again. We're thinking of moving the tanks to the one room we have with a sink, though it may be tight in there. After all of the dust clears (no pun intended) it looks like we will have rooms on the 3rd and 4th floor of Chapman. The aquaria will be in their own room on the third floor and the electronic equipment will have a home on the 4th floor. Things seem to be moving slowly but steadily toward finding a home. The jellies are very excited.

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.

Made it on TV!

We finally made it on TV! Check it out to see our live and mathematical jellyfish: http://watch.discoverychannel.ca/daily-planet/january-2010/daily-planet---january-11-2010/#clip254460

It was quite a challenge to fit everyone into our tiny lab rooms (converted offices). The jellyfish are a little hard to see from the algae bloom as well :) Overall, I think it turned out well despite the limitations, and hopefully we will be moving into a new lab space this summer in Chapman Hall!

Scrubbed and clean

I spent the morning scrubbing salt and cleaning tanks. The mysterious algae in the newest tank seems very persistent. I scrubbed it off the front, so it moved to the back. I scrubbed the back, it moved to the front. And so on. It leaves small green thread-like strands on the tank when I scrub and there is a brown substance that aggregates onto the strands in a few minutes. I scrubbed what I could, hopefully the filters will get some of it. I dropped the light duration in hopes it will starve the algae. We still need to get plexiglass cut for the tops and to work on getting more flow through both compartments.