Well, I wish I could tell you about exciting adventures here in Bermuda, but mostly I have been working.
Just kidding.
But honestly I have finished sooooo many zoox counts and yet soon many more to go. I sacrificed 97 baby corals on Tuesday, and another 100 on Wednesday. Sacrificing (aka killing) the coral is quite a process. The tiles are cleared of algae and photographed under a microscope. A razor blade is used to remove the coral from the tile and each coral is placed in a microcenterfuge tube. The tubes are frozen until I am able to do the zoox count which is then used to calculate the zooxanthellae density. The spat have to be photographed so that the zooxanthellae density can be normalized to their area. Each spat area has to be "corrected" (normalized) because a larger coral will have more zooxs than a tiny coral. We predict that the zooxanthellae density should be different between the two light conditions because when the coral are exposed to higher a light intensity the zooxs leave the coral, which is a bleaching event. Hopefully my data will be really cool and it will be worth it!
Here is a funny little video of all of the completed samples:
Just kidding.
But honestly I have finished sooooo many zoox counts and yet soon many more to go. I sacrificed 97 baby corals on Tuesday, and another 100 on Wednesday. Sacrificing (aka killing) the coral is quite a process. The tiles are cleared of algae and photographed under a microscope. A razor blade is used to remove the coral from the tile and each coral is placed in a microcenterfuge tube. The tubes are frozen until I am able to do the zoox count which is then used to calculate the zooxanthellae density. The spat have to be photographed so that the zooxanthellae density can be normalized to their area. Each spat area has to be "corrected" (normalized) because a larger coral will have more zooxs than a tiny coral. We predict that the zooxanthellae density should be different between the two light conditions because when the coral are exposed to higher a light intensity the zooxs leave the coral, which is a bleaching event. Hopefully my data will be really cool and it will be worth it!
Here is a funny little video of all of the completed samples:
0 comments:
Post a Comment