And So It Begins

On this first week of Senior Research Projects, I cannot say that I have done as much as I would have liked. The plan is to be at The Biosphere 2 every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday but my advisor was in Mexico for most of the week and couldn't meet up until yesterday. In addition to this, I cannot begin my eperiment until mid next week when they set up the pumps necessary.

In the mean time, I am helping out with the aquaponics research that just started. The koi fish are in place and the plants will be added in the next couple of days if it hasn't been added already (pictures to come). To start out, though, they just had me clean the tank a little bit.

A large portion of my remaning time there was spent trying to make food for the koi. I was given a bottle and a hammer and was told to smash tiny pieces of fish food into even smaller pieces.Thirty minutes later I had maybe a fifth of the bottle filled? There was a considerable amount on the floor too because small spherical balls of food are very hard to hit with a big, bulky hammer. There have been mentioned of getting a mortar and pestle in the future and I can't help but hope that future is sooner rather than later.

For my actual experiment I am hoping to tag along with another experiment being done on plastic degradation in the ocean. There will be multiple tanks with different PHs and varying degrees of light with various different types of plastics and microbeads. I am hoping to put in several tiles into each tank to see if the different environments affect the algae growing in them.

See you all next week!