This is a quick post of a few photos from our trip to the South Bay Saltworks earlier this week. Thanks to PhD students Natalia, Emelia, and Srishti for getting up early to go play in the mud, and to Jesse Wilson and Melissa Hopkins for lab-side support!
Getting an early start at one of the lower salinity lakes.
A high salinity lakes with the pink pigmentation clearly visible. Biology is happening!
A high salinity MgCl2 dominated lake. It isn’t clear whether anything is living in these lakes – the green pigmentation could be remnants of microbes that lived in a happier time. Our new OAST project will be further investigating these and other lakes to improve life detection technologies, and better constrain the chemical conditions that are compatible with life.
Srishti and Emelia working very hard at filtering.
Hey Srishti, I think you forgot something!
It will be a long time before we’re done with our analysis for these lakes, but here are a couple of teaser microscope images that reflect the huge difference between an NaCl and MgCl2 dominated lake.
Big, happy bacteria from an NaCl lake at near-saturation.
Same prep applied to an MgCl2 lake. No sign of large bacterial cells. There could be life there but it isn’t obvious…
