Picturas!

Hola mis amigos!

I decided that rather than write up the last week, I would upload the pictures I've been promising for a while now. No worries, you'll still get that adventure, possibly tomorrow. But until then, let me show you around my house and my work for a bit.

Of course I'll start with the best part of the house! This is the dock, which is built about one story above the water. The White family's boat is pulled out of the water underneath it. We absolutely love hanging out in the hammocks, day and night. Behind the hammocks you can see the house itself.

 This is the same view of the house, only without the hammocks in the way. Sarah's sitting on the step reading before work; she'd already jumped in the water and was waiting to get a little dryer before changing for the walk to the Smithsonian.

 This photo, and the next, are taken from the same spot just inside the door that was behind Sarah in the last picture, so my back was to the water in all of these photos. This is our lovely kitchen (note the surfboards in the corner!)

And this is our living room. Really, the living room and the kitchen are one big room, and this is where we spend all of our time. The open door you see in the back corner is my room.

 This was from the first collecting day; Amber and I are in the water here and Sarah took these photos for me. This is a short swim off the Smithsonian dock! The trees to the right are a mangrove island, and the real land behind us is the island. The water was shallow enough that we could stand up, which was fun! It took us about three hours to collect about 700 usable pieces of coral.

 Yay for the underwater camera! The water was a bit murky because we kept standing on the bottom, but I'm placing coral into Amber's collecting bag in this photo.

 This is our experimental set-up; you have to be this far away to get a good view of it! All of the blue barrels and the tables between them are ours. Six tables, each with three barrels; eighteen barrels in all. Each barrel has twelve tanks off of it, making the 216 tanks. This picture was taken from the main lab building looking down at the wet lab.

 This is just an example of exactly how beautiful the Smithsonian complex is. This is a brackish pond under the ramp leading up to the main lab building, and it houses birds, turtles, lizards, and a couple of caymens.

 This is the dock, and the building in the far right of this picture is the wet lab. You can't quite see the mangrove island in this picture; it's just behind the trees on the left.

 Now you can see the mangrove island where we were collecting. These little boats are the Smithsonian's, and we took one of them to collect the sponges. The farthest land you can see here is the mainland of Panama. These boats are also in the picture because they are more common on the island than the taxis, which are numerous! It seems every family has some kind of boat, and all the water taxis are this same model.

 This is looking back up at the main laboratory building. The pond you saw earlier is under that ramp. This is where the admin offices and our lab spaces is. From this picture, the dock and the wet lab are to the left.

 This is a close-up of our system. I laugh a little bit now; it looks a lot crazier now than when I took these pictures! This was before we got the tubing from the barrels to the tanks set up, and I'm sure you can imagine that craziness. If you look very closely, though, you can see the tubing running into the top of the barrels. The wet lab water system is all overhead so that it's all gravity-fed. These tubes are running across to a far line. (Amber's experiment is so big that we keep having to steal water!) Besides getting all the tubing cut and arranged, we've also turned on all the water and put seven pieces of coral in each tank. Our system is officially set up now (but more about that later).

 These are the boring sponges (as in erosion, not as in uninteresting!) That we collected. I put my hand in this photo for size comparison.

 Here are the sponges and some of the coral fragments together in one of the big tanks. We won't officially let the sponges start boring into the corals until August, after they have a chance to acclimate to their new conditions.

And this is one last shot of the lab (the dock is behind the wall you can see, and the lab building to the left, if you still want to orient yourself). Now you can really see the overhead water system and our tubing down from it. One of the cons about this system is that it's unfiltered water, which means sediment clogs the valves regularly. We clear them out by sticking a wire up through the valves about once every twelve hours.

That's all I'll write for now, but expect an update about this last week sometime soon.

Hasta pronto!