Our APS DFD gallery of fluid motion video has found its way to the blog at newscientist.com. They did a nice job with the video! http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2010/11/fluid-nature-psychedleic-jellfish.html
I know that I promised to post more videos on the blog and website. Now that it is the start of the new year, maybe I will actually find some time to make updates! We do have some new simulations of leaves (or flexible plates) fluttering in the wind. I'm also hoping to get more videos of the jellyfish soon.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Saturday, October 16, 2010
New jellyfish flow visualization movie.
After much work Thursday and Friday, we finally got all of the pieces together for our APS DFD gallery of fluid motion entry! You can see the final result here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNu3ErorsDM
We still need to do some work with the fluorescein, most of the video was over saturated. It's possibly harder to do proper flow visualization with the upside down jellyfish because you can't inject a little cloud of dye for the jellyfish to swim through. Also, the elaborate oral arms do a good job of breaking up the streams of dye.
I'd also like to give a big thanks to Christy Hamlet for making last minute videos of her immersed boundary simulations so that we would have enough footage to complete the video and create a good story line.
I think this video ended up better than our first attempt at the fluids gallery, but we still have some work to do. My goal is to start working on next year's video now (rather than next fall) and perfect all of the techniques.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
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.
Monday, July 19, 2010
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!
Friday, July 9, 2010
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.
Monday, June 28, 2010
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.
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.
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.
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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