Week Four

Hey All, Akiko here.

My goodness the weeks are passing by so quickly! During the fourth week, I watched my six new plates get colonized by a variety of settlers. The plates are fouling quickly, which is good because it means that a lot of organisms are settling down on it, but is also difficult because algae and particles have clouded the petri dish and make it hard to clearly see the organism in photos.
I decided to make a little side-experiment out of the redeployment. I actually deployed 12 plates with velcro on the sides instead of underneath. Of the 12 plates, six of them have abrasion on the top side (I scrubbed them with sandpaper to make the surface rough) while six of them are simply smooth plastic. I did this because supposedly settlers prefer to settle on roughened surfaces, and I figured that I could keep track of the rate of settlement on the clear plates versus the smooth plates. I'll count the number of settlers on each plates at some future time during the experiment and see whether the settlers really prefer rough over smooth.

For my main experiment, every day is the same procedure: get the petri dishes out of the water, look at each of them under the dissecting microscope, take photos of specific organisms, and keep track of new species that arrive on my plate. It sounds easy, but the entire process takes about 3-4 hours, and I do it every day (even the weekends). I am trying hard to be a good scientist, even if it means sacrificing my days off. On the bright side, once I start looking at the plates I'm often so absorbed in observing the changes that go on from day to day that the time goes by faster than it would otherwise.

Here are some of the new organisms that have collected on my plates. I haven't had time to adjust the images or put in scale bars, but suffice to say that they are really tiny!

This is probably Schizoporella japonica, a bryozoan. Bryozoans are little animals that settle onto surfaces and reproduce asexually to form larger colonies. This kind of bryozoan is an encrusting bryozoan, meaning that it will continue to spread over the surface in a hard thin layer, like dried paint. When this bryozoan gets bigger, it will begin to reproduce assexually to form a colony.




The spiral shell in this photo belongs to what I believe is a serpulid polychaete worm. You can see little feeding structures sticking out of the mouth of the shell. That is the worm. With these guys, I have to wait for them to peek out of their shells before photographing them.

Trial and Error

((these posts are taken straight from the blog that I have to write for my internship, so they're not quite as personal))

In the third week of my internship, I spent a lot of time focused on my research project. I spent a lot of time diligently following, photographing, and observing the little ascidians that settled on my plate. I used velcro on the backs of my petri dishes to attach them to a large plate hanging in the bay. However, this velcro created a problem in that it obscured the light from the microscopes when trying to take pictures of the ascidians. Furthermore, I found that my original intention of setting out 20 petri dishes was too ambitious: I quickly found myself inundated with work trying to photograph 20+ organisms each day!

I decided that I needed to rethink and redo some parts of my project. With the guidance of my adviser, Professor Richard Emlet, I made new petri dishes that had velcro on the sides of the plates rather than underneath them. That way, the velcro wouldn't distort the light. I also decided to downsize the number of petri dishes deployed. Now I have six clear petri dishes to keep track of instead of twenty. I also decided not to take pictures of all of the organisms each day, but to rotate through them.

On the up side, I am learning something new every day. Each day I dedicate a lot of time (around 3 hours) to observing and photographing the tiny organisms under the microscope, and then I put in a few hours to tidying up the images with photoshop. I'm learning how to recognize settlers of different species too! Here are some that are easy to identify.

Do you recognize this one? This is Botrylloides violaceus, the pictures that I posted on my last blog entry. They are generally easy to recognize because of their huge sunburst-like ampullae and their red, orange or purple hue. They are also relatively large compared to the other early settlers that I see under the microscope.

These next two images are of a different species of colonial ascidian. This is called Distaplia occidentalis. In these photos, you can see three or four little ampullae that look like legs of a tripod in contact with the surface of the petri dish. You can also see a large cylindrical shaped structure that looks like a mesh tube. That is called the branchial basket, and it's connected to the organism's
incurrent or branchial siphon- the nozzle that sucks water into the organism.

Yet another organism that fouls my plates: the sponge. Unfortunately, I don't know the scientific name of this one. However, I do get a lot of sponges on my plates and I take pictures of them, even though they aren't as charismatic as the colonial ascidians.

Project update

So I spent most of the first week researching and designing my project, and during the second week I got to finally start implementing it. After a lot of planning I figured out a way to catch some pictures of microscopic settlers as they mature.

First I sanded the surface of a few petri dishes in order to make an abrasive surface. Supposedly, invertebrate settlers find the roughened surface more appealing to attach to. Then I attached velcro strips to the back of each petri dish with glue. I put longer strips of velcro on a large rectangular plate. This large rectangular plate has four holes drilled into it and rope tied to it, such that it can hang from a dock and be suspended in the water column. After lots of preparation, I attached my petri dishes to the backing plate and lowered them into the water for a few days, checking them every day.

I kept track of individual organisms by making a small grid that can fit over each petri dish, so that I can track their location and confirm that it's the same organism. It's very hard to keep track of them when they are so small! Every day, I took a photograph of each invertebrate settler. I have found that it is difficult to get good images when you're taking a picture through a microscope, but with some lighting adjustments and photoshop help, I hope to get images that could be used for identification.






























These images are all of the same organism. I'm pretty sure that the scientific name is Botrylloides violaceus. I have had quite a number of these settle on my petri dishes. They are easy to identify because of their ampullae: the sunburst-like ring around them.

Beach Day- Oregon Coast style

I spent my Saturday hanging out with the other OIMB kids at the beach! A bunch of us crammed into a car and drove over. This beach is different from the beaches at home. I'm used to Manele/Hulopo'e bay: where the waves break one by one on the sand and the ocean floor drops off to 6 feet or so and then gets deeper from there. Here, the sand slopes down into the water very gradually, such that you can walk out away from shore for at least 20 yards and still be able to stand. However, there are constant waves breaking over you and wicked cross current. Not to mention, the water is around fifty degrees Fahrenheit! For those of you who have never experienced water like that, it means that as soon as you walk in the first sensation you feel is cold, and the second is a flood of pain. It takes about ten minutes for each part of your body to slowly become numb, but until it does, it is pretty excruciating. Last week, I was proud of myself for staying in the water for around 35 minutes without a wet suit. This week however, there was a spare wetsuit so I put it on and went swimming with a few other students. It was fun to be in the water again, though the white wash was battering my face and body with each wave. In fifty degree water it is physically painful to dunk your head in, so duck-diving under the waves was a little difficult.

After my swim, people played football and beach ultimate frisbee. I wanted to play ultimate badly, but I have a terrible blister on my foot that has refused to heal. Just walking on the sand was painful, so I sat out of the game and laid in the sun. Really, not too bad of an option in itself.

So far my experience here has been wonderful. The students are inclusive, accepting, fun-loving and enthusiastic. I'm so glad that they have all made it easy to have friends here. Hanging out with all of them really defines the experience as a positive one for me. The amount of joy and satisfaction in my life relies so heavily on attitudes of people around me, and I am very thankful for all of the positivity and support that I've gotten from the OIMB students.

Some Pictures

The two mushroom like blobs on the left are Distaplia occidentalis, colonial ascidians. The pink colored blob on the right is a sponge, Haliclona sp.



This is Didemnum vexillum the invasive species that has been spreading around the globe. It is also a colonial ascidian, meaning that this blob is made up of thousands of tiny individuals called zooids.




This is from my first day of collecting data! I took this picture of a Botrylloides settler who has just metamorphosed from a free swimming larva to a settled organism. The little sun burst like arms are called ampullae. The main "body" where most of the dark pigment is, is the first zooid (individual) to settle down and is called the oozooid. The oozooid then begins asexual reproduction by budding off new copies of itself, called blastozooids. You can see that this specimen is just starting to make blastozooids- they are the transparent blobs coming off of the top and bottom of the oozoid.