3 March 2022
Airbrushing
Airbrushed all 73 corals collected in January and February 2022 to determine physiological status using the physiological protocols listed here.
Tank brainstorming meeting
Discussed how to set up 12 marine heatwave treatment tanks and 12 ambient tanks with one genotype per treatment and with timepoint fragments (n = 6) with five timepoints and one extra fragment for mortality. Also discussed troubleshooting for temperature of ambient tanks and need for chillers, etc.
Boating updates
To drive the boats at Gump or through the LTER, station guests need to complete a California boat training, 6 check out passenger trips and 6 captain trips before a final checkout with a lab technician or staff to be approved to drive the boats. Danielle is checked out for both the Gump and MCR LTER 509s and 389s per confirmation from Andy. She also has received and printed a hard copy of her California boating card and MCR LTER boating card.
Apex aqua-controller and energy bar units
We brought two APEX aquabus bas units and APEX 832 energy bars and 10 APEX PM1 units to be able to control temperature profiles, heaters, and chillers for our tank set up. In order to use and set specific temperature fluctuations and diel cycles, you need to connect your APEX units to the online APEX fusion interface to be able to control all online functions and APEX controllers. In order to get up and running you can follow the comprehensive APEX reference manual and APEX getting started guide.
Preliminary tank setup
To test if the light and ambient temperature conditions would be favorable for our tank system, HOBO light and temperature loggers, temp probes, heaters, Apex units, and pumps were set up in two XL tanks. One tank was ambient and the other was set to run a diel temperature fluctuation with a max temperature of 30 C. We also wanted to check that the Odyssey light loggers we had calibrated using a LICOR and following the LICOR calibration protocol worked properly so two Odyssey light loggers were deployed in each tank as well. Odyssey light loggers were deployed following the Odyssey quick start guide set to run at 1 minute intervals starting 20220303 at 10:00am till battery exhaustion which would be on October 10th 2022. The HOBO light and temperature loggers were deployed using the HOBOmobile app following the HOBO® Pendant® MX Temp/Light (MX2202) Logger Manual set to log every 1 minute starting on 20220303 at 10:00am until I stopped them in a few days.
pH calibration
Calibrated our Orion pH/conductivity meter using a tris pH standard curve generation general protocol and the conductivity two-point calibration.
Tank fill Training
Kathryn taught Danielle and Lauren how to fill scuba tanks using the compressor available for use at Gump station. They have a video if anyone may need one in the future.