Hello, hope everyone is doing well! This week at the HIMB, Miranda and I were able to finish all the set up and work needing to be done in order to help our experiment go underway. Rob Toonen, Miranda, Evan, and I were able to take out a research boat to Humbug reef and collect four colonies of the Pocillopera Meandrina. This species of coral was tough to collect as it had large strong tissue. It was very interesting to see how different this species of Pocillopera differed from the Pocillopera Damicornis we had collected earlier in the bay. We then epoxied 60 fragments from these colonies, 15 from each, then left them to rest in the coral nursery.
During the week, Rob, Miranda, and I obtained and set up pumps and air stones for our tanks. There are five sets of tanks and three tanks per set. In one set of tanks, there will be nothing. One set will contain just an air stone for each tank. Another set will have small pumps that over turn about 70 gallons per minute. The next two sets will have larger pumps that will produce more flow. The sea water irrigation lines are constantly getting clogged and need to be cleaned and rearranged often. We also made trays and moved our corals across the island from the coral nursery to our experiment wet table tanks. Our wet table is right next to the shark pond. Some of the Montipera corals we epoxied had died and we had to recollect and epoxy new ones. One of the Meandrina corals has died already. We are expecting that the Meandrina in the tanks with low flow will die quickly.
On Friday we went to a seminar on coastline devastation and the economic effects of coral loss. This seminar looked at how these issues are rapidly advancing and how they can be more effectively presented to fund restoration projects. 
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