I apologize for the delay in getting this post up! I actually had it written last week when I should have posted it, but this last week has been an insane amount of work. You'll hear all about it in my next blog post, which is not yet written but I hope to have up today or tomorrow. Now with that disclaimer, on to the rest of the story!
Hola mis amigos!
Hola mis amigos!
It's been another very busy week here
in Panama! The first, and most exciting thing, is that we have the
water turned on! After two weeks of building, this felt like a
massive accomplishment. But let me start at the beginning.
Last Sunday one of Amber's friends,
named Greg, arrived to help us for a week. He's a teacher at South
Hampton High School, and he's in charge of the marine biology
electives and the lab they have. He came down for a week to help us
build gutters on the tables, figure out water flow, and organize all
of the electronic measurement systems.
The gutters are necessary because each
tank, to maintain water flow, has a tube going in and then just
overflows onto the table. It's really not as much fun to do all the
measurements and such if your feet get wet every time, and the salt
water could easily corrode the metal table legs by December (which is
the end date of the project). So to fix this problem, we tilted the
tables slightly and screwed a PVC pipe with a slit cut out of it to
each table. Now there are only minimal drips! This is the only part
of the project we've had to re-do; the first time we cut the PVC
pipes in half, and there was simply too much water and they were
overflowing. The second time we cut about an inch- wide strip out of
the circumference, and that worked much better.
I also spent a lot of this week
labeling things. Each rain barrel and each tank got a color-coded
label that was numbered, and we also wrote the tank numbers on the
table so when we moved the tanks it would be easy to put them back.
We also cut tubing of appropriate length to feed the rain barrels
from the wet lab water system, and tubing to go from the rain barrels
to the individual tank. Each one of the eighteen rain barrels feeds
twelve tanks. All of this tubing also needed labeling; can you
imagine the mess we would have if we got some of the tubing, cut to
length, mixed up without a label on it?
Once we had all of this done (with the
first round gutters), we got to turn on the water for one of the
tables. This was when we realized the flaw in our gutter design, and
we also realized that the tanks couldn't just overflow over the top;
they were flowing into each other and would contaminate the different
treatments. To rectify this problem, Sarah and Greg spent an
afternoon drilling half-inch holes in the tanks. It's incredible how
long stuff takes when you have to do it 216 times!
Once we had the drilled tanks back in
place, the tubing labeled and put in the right tank, we turned the
water on for the whole system. It was a really fantastic thing to
watch everything fill up! But then, of course, came the adjustments.
This is going to be my life for the rest of my time here, I think.
Because the whole water system for the
wet lab is based on tides, you get varying water flow depending on
whether or not it's high tide or low tide. You also get sediment and
shells and things flowing through the system, which can clog the
valves. For Amber's experiment, we need about 0.5 liter per minute of
water flow in each tank, which means we're pretty much maxing out the
water we can get. Also, because the flow from the rain barrels to the
tanks is driven by gravity, we need to have enough water in the
barrels to maintain pressure so the water keeps flowing. When there
isn't enough of this pressure (called head pressure), the tubes can
get air-locked, which is when the water doesn't have enough pressure
to push the air in the tube out. Each tube, also, has a slightly
different flow rate due to how long it is, what side of the barrel
it's on, and basically just the tricky nature of the thing.
Greg and I spent nearly two days
adjusting each of the 216 valves, and we definitely don't have them
all dialed in yet. Maintaining head pressure in the barrels is quite
a balancing act; you have to give the animals enough water to live
but you can't use more water than is coming in. We're also going to
have to clean out the eighteen big valves at least every day to make
sure we're getting enough water. But despite all of this fiddliness,
I'm still excited. At least we have a system to fiddle with!
The other accomplishments for this week
include getting all the CO2 tanks secured and tubed and
wired with the pH monitors, and setting up all the outlets and
extension cords for the pH monitors and the heaters. As soon as we
got it all set up, of course, we had to waterproof the whole thing as
best we could, which in our case meant using zip ties to secure
zip lock bags over everything. We'll see how everything holds up as we
go.
On Monday, another scientist named
Melissa is coming who will be using our system to do molecular work
with sponges. She'll be bringing a million and three microscope
slides, which will mean the beginning of our last big project;
preparing the corals. Each coral needs to get weighed, tagged, and
then glued to a microscope slide so it stands upright in the tank.
However, each tank is going to get seven corals. 216 times 7 is 1512
pieces of coral, so we'll be busy for a while. Fortunately the
sponges don't need any preparation before we put them in the tanks!
And lest you all think I'm a total
biology dork and all I do down here is talk about marine ecology,
I'll tell you a little about our afternoons and evenings. Normally we
knock off work around three, before the chichras get too bad. When we
get home, we all kind of lounge and read and swim and shower. Because
Greg was here this week, we took the opportunity to go out to eat
several times. Amber's favorite restaurant is called Ultimo Refugio,
and it's absolutely fantastic. We also took Greg back to our sushi
place from last week, and one night we simply went out for brownies
at a boat-turned-bar called Riptide. After dinner we'd hang about
again, watching the sting rays swim around (there's a group of about
seven that are here every night) and enjoying the breeze. The nights
here are absolutely glorious.
This weekend thus far has been pretty
mellow; it's raining today so I took the opportunity to do laundry,
clean up and organize all my stuff, and catch up on writing. My next
project is uploading pictures, so hopefully the post after this will
explain the experimental set-up much better than I've been able to in
words!
Until next time,
Hasta pronto!
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