Tube city

Inside ESL. This place is Tube City!

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I'd like to introduce you to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Environmental Systems Laboratory. This building, located just a few hundred feet from the beach on the south shore of Cape Cod, is home to numerous experiments maintained by WHOI scientists, all the plumbing they require, and the dull roar you would expect from an uninsulated wooden building full of running seawater lines. I'm using the ESL facilities for an experiment using the slipper limpet, Crepidula fornicata, and in short, I will be spending a lot of time here this summer.

Crepidula females in one of my experimental treatments.

I set up my experiment in one corner of ESL, on a metallic rack with two seawater tables (in the foreground of the photo above). Thankfully, a technician was able to set up the rack and the seawater lines for me. My experimental design involves keeping female Crepidula fornicata at two different temperatures, so I rigged up one side with water from a cooled seawater line (about 15° C) and the other with heated water (about 22° C). I also want to see how the Crepidula are affected by food supply, so I separated my specimens into three bins on each side, one for no food, one for low food, and one for high food.

Over the next couple months, I will be maintaining Crepidula females under these conditions (different temperature and food supply), and then when they spawn, I will see if there are any carryover effects of the mother's environment on the larvae. This experiment is part of a new research direction I'm exploring, about variation in larval dispersal within a single species. If some individuals are born larger, stay in the larval form longer, or have different behaviors, they could disperse farther and colonize island-like habitats like shipwrecks or dropstones or experimental panels or fjords (as you can tell, this work builds on my previous analyses of island-like habitats). I'm starting with an easy species for my first experiment, and then we'll see where the science takes me.

Stay tuned over the next couple months for updates on this experiment. Fingers crossed that it works!