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Hidden Mussels



The first three days of this summer school were devoted to defining our subject, adapting it to the facilities, preparing and testing our lab experiments with a pilot study and re-adapting our project! After three nerve-breaking days of preparation, our project is finally ready and we leave for a first sampling expedition! We will study the influence of temperature on phytoplankton communities and on mussels.



To answer this question we needed to find a place in the bay where there would be mussel colonies to collect our water and phytoplankton samples at the same location. Seems like an easy task? Well, it wasn't. It took us more than an hour and a half and an observation of the whole bay of Tjarnö before we found, on our way back, a tiny colony of mussels lost on a buoy in the middle of the bay. We collected more than 50 liters of water before returning to the aquarium. Meanwhile, the rest of the team spent all their time, energy, frustration and hopes and dreams in building an amazing ARDUINO sensor to measure temperature and turbidity and to turn on and off a heating system when it reaches a given temperature. Once the samples landed, the second step was to filter them to remove the zooplankton. 3 hours and 18 liters per triplicate later we eventually placed the water in the aquariums in which the temperature will be increased. Some water has also been filtered for chlorophyll a analysis and cell counts.



Take-home messages of this day: watch out for sunburns on boats, mussels know how to hide, ARDUINO could be fun after all, the filtrations are Satan but the water is warm and swimming is cool! Now, let’s go to sleep...
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