Odds and ends

The beginning of my 2015 could have gone...better. After the horrid trip to the DMV, I had some things stolen, unexpected expenses, got stung (most likely) by a scorpion, I found out our lab supervisor is moving away (nooooooo!), and that really awful Superbowl happened. I'm not talking about it.

Here are some of the better odds and ends of 2015!


The pet tank

As all of you know, we have a few pet tanks at work where the stowaway animals from other shipments are kept and raised by the lab. One of the sea stars was apparently very hungry...

Collectively, the lab reacted this way:

Hey did you see the sea star in the tank? It looks like it might eat the urchin.
Do sea stars eat urchins?
I don't think so - they have spines for a reason.
Hey do sea stars eat urchins?
Do you think it's just crawling over the top of it to get to the other side of the tank?
They don't eat urchins right?

It ate the urchin.

After seeing the carnage the next morning we put some more mussels in the tank for meal time. The murderous sea star actually ate one of the mussels against the glass, so we got a great view of what it looks like. You can see it's stomach wrapped around the mussel.

The other urchins in the tank can take a hint. They've grabbed those mussel shells from the bottom and are currently holding them with their tube feet against their spines. Like armor. 

Kelp tests

I learned my very first advanced test at work. Kelp! Essentially we test the toxicity of different effluents using kelp spores. If they germinate successfully in the test water, then the effluent isn't considered toxic to kelp (a classically sensitive species).

On the left is the full batch of kelp spores. We washed the kelp blades, let them dry overnight, and re-submerged them in cold seawater, where they released all of their spores. The containers on the right are less dense spore dilutions. We go through a system where we count the number of spores under a microscope and make a solution containing the correct number of spores for the test (the one used is the "inoculum"). 

Water fleas

One of our project managers did a plankton tow on a local lake and found an exceptionally large water flea in the sample. I guess this specific species was so abundant in the plankton that he wanted to find out what exactly it was. Side note: it is also twitchy, and gross. It naturally only has one eye! A cyclops!

It turns out that this species is an exotic, introduced zooplankton. It's scientific name is Daphnia lumholtzi and it's natural distribution is restricted to Australia, southwest Asia, and Africa.

So how did it get here?!? This was one of the more interesting things I've learned in a while:

It literally floated over on the wind from Africa.