Barnacle Feeding

They're just so darn cute!

DataDataData

It has been collecting time for the past couple weeks here in the Fields lab. I did a couple runs of filming and analyzing groups of barnacles feeding to find their beat frequency. Here's a graph showing 9 barnacles and their responses to the change in temperature. I'll hopefully be able to upload a little video clip to show what I've been looking at, but right now the file size is waaaay too large.

The grazing experiments are well underway. I did a preliminary experiment with just a couple rocks filled with barnacles to see if 4 hours is enough time for them to eat enough to make a difference. And it is! They ate about 30% of what I gave them, which was Thallasiosira weissfloggi (TW for short, a type of algae). Today I started a culture of TW which will hopefully grow like crazy and be ready for barnacle grazing on Sunday/Monday.
Now the only thing left to tackle is the boundary layer/reynolds number calculations...

pictures (look down...)

picture 1: view from the floating dock at Bigelow, looking up towards the main building. Photo taken during low tide, water rises an additional 9 ft during high tide here!

picture 2: view from the stationary dock at Bigelow, still looking twards the main building.

picture 3: view from where pic2 was taken. Looking out at the harbor, the location where I'm staying is to the right across the harbor.

picture 4: view from behind the main building. One of the "labs" that can be driven across the country, and put on a ship!

picture 5: view from outside the main building, to the left and down is where the docks are.

picture 6: view of the back of the main building, my lab is in the grey building, the white one story is the conference/break room.

picture 7: view from inside Fields lab, where I spend most of my time. Towards the back left is the flume, with the large black cylinder going into it (velocimeter). To the right is the video station, and the computer as well.

Pictures! (with comments to come)

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!

Excuse me, flow?

This is a picture of the flume set-up in the lab. I will re-post a more clear picture when I remember to bring my camera to the lab. The tall black tube sticking up is a velocimeter, which measures the velocity of water flow without interfering with the particles moving through the flow, by triangulating some sort of beam that sends back to the computer. The flume has salt water on the inside chamber, with a turbine to make the water flow. The outside is filled with fresh water that regulates the temperature of the inside part. We hooked up the camera today to film our little barnacles! David, Quincy, Brandon and I all stared mesmerized at the screen watching these little barnacles hold out their appendages to catch some plankton. So cool. Our proposals are due this Friday, so I'm going to get writing!
The next photo is a view from where the camera is mounted, looking onto where the barnacles are.