Diving In

The barnacle adventures are well underway. Yesterday we threw a bunch of barnacles in a jar of water collected from the dock. We gave them 24 hours to eat as much as they wanted, and then today tested the water again using the FlowCAM to see what they ate. A problem we ran into was that the water we had collected had gobs and gobs (a unit of measure only know to Fields lab) of stuff ranging in size from 10-200 microns. So the issue was that we suspect a lot of the larger stuff in the water was eating the smaller stuff which was seen in our control. (So it's inconclusive whether the barnacles ate the small stuff, or if the bigger stuff ate the small stuff) Anyway. I've been processing through a lot of the film I took this week. I filmed the barnacles at temperatures ranging from 75F - 50F and I've been counting how many times they fan their feeding arm to get a feeding rate. It's so remarkable to see their feeding habits change, they love the cold water! crazy! So this weekend will be a lot more processing through the film, and planning the details of the next set of grazing experiments. Wahoo!