Just had dinner and you’re still hungry? Want some leftovers? Well if you can answer ‘yes’ to both of those questions, you might be a scavenger... Good for you, we’re going to be focused on that topic for the next 10 days, we are Team 8, the ScAvengers of the IMBRSea Joint School 2018. So we’ll probably be able to tell you more about your condition at the end of our research..
Our project’s aim is to characterise the scavenging activity in the Bay of Tjärnö, Sweden. For this, we are based at the beautiful Sven Loven Marine Centre. Collecting and preparing the equipment we need will for sure be a great opportunity for us to express our creativity and inventiveness (pictures are coming...).
We are now three days into the joint school. The first day of work was dedicated to extreme brainstorming about what to do, the experimental design, what type of work we wanted to carry out and so on. It was very intense. We made up our minds on the way to set the baits in the water to discover what organisms are interested in our dead mackerels, and to see how fast they are at scavenging this marvelous smelly food. We will perform the experiment in two different types of habitats.
Then came the time to actually try to build the equipment we imagined... As said: imagination and creativity were keys here. Here you can see the different versions of the built photo quadrat:
Here you can see the three different prototypes, including our final masterpiece.
We spent an awful lot of time sewing small mesh nets on existing cages to create our traps.
As it is 2018, women are the ones in charge and men execute orders. Just kidding, this picture shows you Megalo Don, TurtleWoman and Lobo do Mar working on the traps.
...While Captain Penguin creates a quadrat with better colours than the old ones.
We were really lucky to get Margarida, “the Super Chef” as our supervisor as she has been greatly helpful during this building and handiwork day. She was able to scavenge the crucial tools and materials needed to build the cages and traps which we are going to use to capture those hungry scavengers of the sea, feeding on our beloved and most vulnerable (well, they’re dead..) mackerels.
Brave Iron Whale and Lady Porpoise dedicated their bodies for science’s sake and went into the abyssal plains (1.5 m..) to test the photo quadrats, the visibility and ultimately the quality of the pictures.
Lady Porpoise and Iron Whale snorkeling happily in their native waters.
Before starting our actual experiment, we tested our traps in order to have an idea of the scavengers species living in the unfathomable waters of Tjärnö Bay and to determine how fast the carrion is degraded. We therefore put fish into our trap to observe the scavenger activity. Large chunks were already missing after only a few hours.
Now that we know that our quadrats are functional and now that our traps and cages are built, we will proceed with carrying out the actual experiment during the coming days. Hopefully everything goes well... Ahah, no we can’t kid ourselves that way.. But we have good hope that our fully functional and inventive team, along with our Super Chef, are going to overcome the problems that are bound to arise.
Our project’s aim is to characterise the scavenging activity in the Bay of Tjärnö, Sweden. For this, we are based at the beautiful Sven Loven Marine Centre. Collecting and preparing the equipment we need will for sure be a great opportunity for us to express our creativity and inventiveness (pictures are coming...).
We are now three days into the joint school. The first day of work was dedicated to extreme brainstorming about what to do, the experimental design, what type of work we wanted to carry out and so on. It was very intense. We made up our minds on the way to set the baits in the water to discover what organisms are interested in our dead mackerels, and to see how fast they are at scavenging this marvelous smelly food. We will perform the experiment in two different types of habitats.
Then came the time to actually try to build the equipment we imagined... As said: imagination and creativity were keys here. Here you can see the different versions of the built photo quadrat:
Here you can see the three different prototypes, including our final masterpiece.
We spent an awful lot of time sewing small mesh nets on existing cages to create our traps.
As it is 2018, women are the ones in charge and men execute orders. Just kidding, this picture shows you Megalo Don, TurtleWoman and Lobo do Mar working on the traps.
...While Captain Penguin creates a quadrat with better colours than the old ones.
We were really lucky to get Margarida, “the Super Chef” as our supervisor as she has been greatly helpful during this building and handiwork day. She was able to scavenge the crucial tools and materials needed to build the cages and traps which we are going to use to capture those hungry scavengers of the sea, feeding on our beloved and most vulnerable (well, they’re dead..) mackerels.
Brave Iron Whale and Lady Porpoise dedicated their bodies for science’s sake and went into the abyssal plains (1.5 m..) to test the photo quadrats, the visibility and ultimately the quality of the pictures.
Lady Porpoise and Iron Whale snorkeling happily in their native waters.
Before starting our actual experiment, we tested our traps in order to have an idea of the scavengers species living in the unfathomable waters of Tjärnö Bay and to determine how fast the carrion is degraded. We therefore put fish into our trap to observe the scavenger activity. Large chunks were already missing after only a few hours.
Now that we know that our quadrats are functional and now that our traps and cages are built, we will proceed with carrying out the actual experiment during the coming days. Hopefully everything goes well... Ahah, no we can’t kid ourselves that way.. But we have good hope that our fully functional and inventive team, along with our Super Chef, are going to overcome the problems that are bound to arise.
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