08 April 2022

Symbiont counts

Lauren completed the remainder of the symbiont counts from TP2 which can be found on the Heatwave Google Drive. She also cleaned tanks with Danielle and fed the feeding experiment corals for 30 minutes starting at 17:30.

Heatwave

Danielle started the eighth day of the heatwave period for the corals to to experience a diel fluctuation in the heated treatement of 29.5 °C to 30.2 °C.

Daily measurements

Danielle recorded bleaching score and survivorship for the fragments and colonies and completed a daily measurements of light, temperature, salinity and pH. She also cleaned the tanks.

Bleaching score processing

Following Emma Strands Bleaching Score Protocol Emma, Hollie, Kristen, and Danielle have started processing the daily colony photos to track when the ambient and hot colonies start to differ in bleaching score. They have been updating the Photographic Bleaching Script often to make these comparisons and consult on moving forward. It is important to see a biological stress response to the bleaching in the colonies experiencing the heatwave to know they show a reaction to the bleaching but we are being cautious to make sure they will still survive transplantation and subsequent sampling during spawning in October 2022.

After todays processing, we began to see a bleaching difference between the ambient and hot treatment.

Data tracking

All daily measurements, bleaching score, and survivorship tracking for the colonies and fragments can be found on the Heatwave Google Drive and Gametogenesis GitHub.