Sometimes working weekends can be a lot of fun. Last Saturday morning we carried out the second Scripps Institution of Oceanography visit by undergraduate biology majors from National University for our NSF-funded project CURE-ing Microbes on Ocean Plastics. We recovered a plastic colonization experiment that we started last month, installed the next iteration of the experiment, and finally replaced the pump intake for our continuous flow membrane inlet mass spec (MIMS). Many thanks to PhD students Natalia Erazo, Srishti Dasarathy, and Emelia Chamberlain for taking the time to work with the the National University undergraduates, and to Kasia Kenitz in the Barton Lab for the diving assist! Here are a couple of photo/video highlights from the day.
A short video of the plastic colonization experiment after one month of incubation. Though there has been some swell it hasn’t been a particularly stormy month. Despite that the cages that hold our plastic wafers were hanging by a thread! I need to come up with a better system before the winter storms hit…
Chasing a school of baitfish under the pier after installation. At the end of the video you can see the shiny new cage with the next set of plastic wafers, and to the right our newly installed pump intake for the MIMS.
Natalia and Srishti tell it like it is to National University students on the SIO pier.
Checking out microbes in the lab after field sampling on the pier.
