Happy Sunday everybody! Another week, another experimental failure, and more frustration in the Miller Lab. That is actually an overexaggerati0n. Everyone was calm even though half of the urchin population died off once again. I would say it was a “happy accident” not an experimental failure. Since the urchins were to be sacrificed following the final day of feeding, it is actually a relief for them to instead be released back into the open ocean. Well, it is for the ones that survived at least. It is also very shocking how amazed beach people are when someone pulls up with a cooler full of sea urchins and just starts hucking them back into the water.
To kick off the week on Monday, John and I had to collect all of the urchin poop from their weekend feeding period. The poop was collected in an ultrafine sieve and put into half-filled
Weighing out a nice piece of Chondracanthus exasperatus.
seawater files for CHN testing. The CHN testing on the poop will help determine the overall health of the urchin. Unfortunately, we did all of this disgusting work before we realized that 11 out of 15 red urchins were deceased. Since Katrina was on a dive until 4 o’clock, a decision was made to measure and weigh all of the remaining, living urchins even though there was no way we could use the results. That was a waste of time but I felt like the bonding time was worth it. I was convinced over two hours of weighing urchins that unitarianism was a respectable religion. We also weighed the remaining algae left in the containers after all of the urchins finished feeding to get a feel for how much algae diminished or was eaten.
A lot of the time in the lab this week was spent alone as Katrina was out on many dives completing benthic surveys so I would get a little lonely. The worst of this came when I had to grind algae for 3 hours straight without human contact. This came after I siphoned two tanks and I thought I was going to go crazy. Something had happened to our algae samples in the dehydrator and they did not dehydrate all of the way before they started to stick to the aluminum holding boats. Imagine trying to beat a piece of fresh cabbage into a fine powder. It’s impossible if there is even a smidgen of elasticity in the leaf. The arm workout is world-class. I was expected to do this to 50 pieces of algae and I finished 11. We finished the rest of the algae pieces as a team late in the week.
Katrina brought in another 40 urchins after her routine dive for experiment round 3! Hopefully, 3rd
This is a species of algae that was new to me last week. Anushna, another intern, identified the species as Cryptopleura ruprechtiana.
time is truly the charm because if it is not I will leave Santa Barbara without having witnessed a successful experiment. This time we are completely removing the mesh from the urchin feeding cages, providing an extra hose-worth of flow to the holding tub, completely immobilizing the urchins for the entirety of the experiment, and crossing our fingers. This is my last shot. I will not be discouraged if I come out empty-handed though. Science is science and there nothing else you can do about it. If the red urchins are hypersensitive to human contact and captivity their death will be inevitable no matter what actions we take. The bright side is that we know this experiment has been done before. It is possible.
Outside of the tense laboratory this week was the tense moments at Banc of California Stadium during the MLS match that Justine and I attended. We sat on the goal line as LAFC duked out a 4-3 win over Atlanta United on Friday night. We saw 5 goals fired into the net less than 20 feet away from us. As out-of-staters, we figured that we had to root for the out of state team even though we were right in the middle of an LAFC fan-filled stadium. A couple of dirty looks and unhappy faces turned toward us as Atlanta threatened to tie the game in the second half but we made it out alive. Always an adventure in the city of angels, always an adventure!
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