General Update

A little progress has been made in terms of the experiment. Last Saturday, I met with Ali, the college student in charge of the experiment and we brainstormed ways to hang up the UV lights so that it equally hits all 4 tanks (we will hopefully be hanging it from the ceiling although we need to wait for the handyman to come in to give his two cents on the matter) and we filled a tank with ocean water and began releasing CO2 in it in order to lower the pH. Hopefully this means sometime soon I can place some tiles into the water and hope some algae grows.

In addition, on Tuesdays I may begin to help out in the Ocean Viewing Gallery with maintaining the tanks. So far all I've helped out with consists of finding nitrate, nitrite, pH, ammonia, and many, many other factors in the various tanks and making sure all the tanks are clean. Yesterday, they got some nudibranchs that eat these small, invasive species of anemones called Aiptasia that have been causing some issues.

The fight continues to slowly raise the salinity of the ocean. Last week I helped to drag 21 boxes, each weighing around 50lbs, of salt to the pier which was slowly poured in later that day. A few days later a few of us dumped another 300lbs of salt in and yesterday, some students visiting poured in a few more. After all of this, the salinity of our ocean raised only about 3ppt.

The seeds that I planted a few weeks ago are growing really nicely and I have moved them over to the aquaponics unit where they are no longer using soil but the water and the nutrients in it provided by the koi fish that are now being fed 9g of fish feed a day and will actually eat out of your hand! They are so precious.