First we had a conference call up at Iliana's group's house with Mike Brittsan who is in Curacao with another crew of SECORE folks for the Elkhorn coral spawning there.
We had a nice lunch with our group at the Shipwreck Cafe. Nicole, who owns the restaurant catered for us two years ago, and is doing so again this year, but with such a smaller group we are able to go up there for lunch each day. She's a really great cook. Mary and I made a trip to the bank again today and another trip to the store to stock up on some food stuff.
The cryo-team arrived late last night. Dr. Jason Acker, from the University of Alberta joins us for the second year in a row. Being Canadian he's completely unadapted to the heat here, and as he says about last year "I don't think you've ever seen a human being melt before." Rafael Uribe is also joining us for a second year and comes from Dr. Terry Tiersch's lab at LSU. Megan McCarthy is new to the Puerto Rico team this year and she joins us from Stuart Meyers' lab at UC Davis. It's a really great group of people added to our already great group we have with the SECORE aquarists here. We had a really good meeting with our cryo-team to discuss our experimental plan and decide who was doing what. The meeting went well and I feel like we are well prepared for what we need to do. Briefly, Mary and I will be doing some optimal fertilization concentration experiments with fresh sperm to figure out what sperm concentration is best for fertilizing with this species. We will also be looking at a few different cryoprotectants to see if there is toxicity even before any freezing takes place. We will also be testing if the elkhorn coral sperm is chill sensitive. After all that, Rafael and Jason will be doing two different cryopreservation methods and we will be fertilizing with sperm that looks the best from that. Megan has the very important job of examining the sperm on the scope for density before experiments and motility before sperm comes to me for the fertilizations so we don't have unnecessary fertilization trials. This is the plan for the first spawning night and then based on our findings the next day (we can't analyze the fertilizations until the next day) we will form a plan for banking sperm the next night. I feel like we have a good solid plan this year and everyone has their roles and things should go smoothly. We got geared up this evening just in case we had an early spawn tonight, but they did not spawn. The actual spawn is predicted for tomorrow night, so no spawning tonight is not a bad thing. It was great that we geared up for it though because now we are all set for tomorrow night and just have to wait.
Eric, Brian and Mike have a really nice looking system set up in the bottom of the yellow house with kreisels for raising their larvae. They are having some issues with dissolved oxygen levels and evaporation, but some water changes tomorrow should alleviate the problem.
We also had some volunteers come this evening to see what we need help with. Steve Tamar volunteered with us last year and has been in touch with Mary all year and coordinated some groups to volunteer this year. He brought Joel and Sandra today. Joel is here interning with Surfrider Puerto Rico and is an environmental law student at Vermont Law School. Sandra is a professor at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez and she coordinates an environmental program there. She will be bringing 9 volunteers tomorrow and 7 Sunday. Volunteers were a great help last year when I was on the beach trying to coordinate the divers and the collection of the spawn. The volunteers ran samples to the cryo team and helped get the samples from the divers. They also kept an eye on the houses and equipment when we were busy in the water and on the beach. This year we are on a much smaller scale, but the volunteers will be equally helpful. They will be split between helping with our group to bring us samples of egg-sperm bundles for our cryo work and our SECORE aquarists' kreisels and also helping Iliana's group and her SECORE folks.
Some pics from today:
We got the hose on the liquid nitrogen tank this morning and filled our dry shippers and our small liquid nitrogen dewar.
Getting the tank ready was pretty funny, apparently. :)
Mary is about to disappear in the vapor!
Dry shippers. These are neat little containers that have a material inside that absorbs the liquid nitrogen so that you can ship things that cold without having actual liquid sloshing around. Very useful!
The very nice set up for our group's kreisels this year.
Eric measures dissolved oxygen this morning and discovers it is quite low.
Brian snorkeling and fixing one of the bouy tags on one of our elkhorn coral colonies. Eric and Brian and Mike went out and picked coral colonies that looked good for our cryo-experiments. In order to do our fertilizations properly, we must ensure that we get eggs and sperm from different colonies, so marking good colonies allows them to go back with a next for spawning that will fit over a colony so that we know we get egg-sperm bundles from that colony only.
Discussing things with Sandra. Next to her is Michael Byers who has come to help Jason set up and use a very nice little freezer that can go at -15 degrees C per minute without the use of liquid nitrogen. Very nice of him to come all the way out here to ensure that we are able to use this piece of equipment to the best of its abilities. Mike Henley is playing on his iphone, of course. See pic below as well. ;) We are definitely the Mac crew here this year as Mary, Eric, Mike, Jason and myself all have Macs and then Mike, Jason, Michael and I all have iphones.
Mary, Rafael and Jason at our preparation meeting.
Megan also at the meeting.
Some cute little houses on a hill outside of downtown Rincon. Mary and I both love the use of color here. Wish we had more of that in Hawaii.
My fertilization trial vials all set up but nothing to put in them yet.
And our new critter for tonight. We have these in Hawaii too, but still not one I really wanted to see.
Aloha all!
P.S. Subphonix is tonight, so if you are reading this from Oahu, you should go. ;)
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