Anything-can-happen Thursday: part 2
One of my absolute favorite things is to open up a sample, having no idea what I will find inside, and analyze it. This week, I had the chance to do that. I received a box from Norway, thanks to some extremely helpful colleagues, and was able to analyze the last samples for my study on larval transport and settlement in the high Arctic.
For the past two years, I've been opportunistically giving larval traps and fouling panels to colleagues who deploy and maintain oceanographic moorings. My samplers were small and simple, and the idea was to use the existing mooring infrastructure for a value-added research project. You may recall a set of my samplers was recovered this summer from the Fram Strait, and it held some surprises for me. Well, the last of my samples arrived in my lab this week, and I could not wait to break them open.
The first surprise actually came in an e-mail. One of my colleagues who worked on the mooring sent me a photo of the larval traps immediately after recovery. They were covered in hydroids! All the other samplers have gotten pretty low colonization, so I wasn't expecting much. These traps were deployed for 2 years instead of one, like all the others, and it appears that extra year made all the difference!
The second thing that surprised me was the number of different species that had colonized my fouling panels. There were three different bryozoans, and I had not gotten any bryozoans in my other samples. I took good photos and sent them to another colleague, who I'm hoping can help identify them. I think bryozoans are beautiful, and I was excited to find some on my panels.
The main question I still have to answer is why these samplers got so much more growth than the 1-year samplers. I'm curious whether something was different between 2019 and past years, or whether just staying out for longer (2 years instead of one) let a biofilm accumulate on the samplers and attract more growth. Thankfully, because I'm working with oceanographers, instruments on the moorings will have recorded the temperature and salinity of the water over time. I'll have to see if I can detect any differences in the environmental conditions that might explain the growth on my samplers. I'm very excited for these new data!
For the past two years, I've been opportunistically giving larval traps and fouling panels to colleagues who deploy and maintain oceanographic moorings. My samplers were small and simple, and the idea was to use the existing mooring infrastructure for a value-added research project. You may recall a set of my samplers was recovered this summer from the Fram Strait, and it held some surprises for me. Well, the last of my samples arrived in my lab this week, and I could not wait to break them open.
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| Impressive hydroid growth on my larval traps! Photo by Angelika Renner. |
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| One of the bryozoans from my fouling panels |
The main question I still have to answer is why these samplers got so much more growth than the 1-year samplers. I'm curious whether something was different between 2019 and past years, or whether just staying out for longer (2 years instead of one) let a biofilm accumulate on the samplers and attract more growth. Thankfully, because I'm working with oceanographers, instruments on the moorings will have recorded the temperature and salinity of the water over time. I'll have to see if I can detect any differences in the environmental conditions that might explain the growth on my samplers. I'm very excited for these new data!
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