Skip to main content

The final chapter

Hey guys! The Crab Therapists here with their last blog post. We will leave the beautiful bay of Tjärnö tomorrow and set sail for new adventures.
C:\Users\Nadine\Desktop\P1130552.jpg
After pulling a night shift yesterday, we finally corrected all the bugs in our dataset, analysed all of it using non-parametric multidimensional scaling and finally came to the conclusion that our little buggars showed no difference between lower pH levels and gasoline spill conditions compared to controls. Sadly, there are many reasons why we could not see any differences. For example, literature says that hermit crabs are really resilient to pollutants and acidification, and we need to consider our short time frame as well. Nevertheless, we had a lot of fun designing this study on our own and have learnt quite a lot. We successfully presented our findings today in front of our peers and are now very relieved to be free at last. Make sure you keep in touch with the official IMBRSea Youtube channel, where our movie documentary will be published shortly. It will make you cry, I promise. All the best wishes and hugs from Sweden! May science ever be with you! *mic drop* *crab therapists out*
C:\Users\Nadine\Downloads\IMG_4471.JPG
Written by Nadine Ofiera

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Goodbye my BRUVver, Goodbye my friend

Just a few hours are left of the summer school, the report is done, presentation complete, video shown (to mixed reviews…philistines). We’ve had an incredible time here in Sweden and have learned a lot, about fish, BRUV devices, and ourselves… One of the many beautiful sunsets of Tjärnö Surprisingly our experiments worked out well, we discovered that the most complex habitats did indeed have the most fish. They like structures and hiding places, but not as much as they like mussels…which is why we managed to actually see them on the video! We watched many clips like this screenshot to count so many fish Thank you for keeping up with Team eFISHency over the past 10 days! We’ve enjoyed every moment (well mostly…), and are really happy with our work! xoxo Gossip Pearl

The wet lab odyssey begins

The Hunger Games wouldn’t be as majestic and thrilling if it weren’t for the games being held in Panem, a futuristic city where the wealthiest and wisest of all beings control the rest of the districts and shape the lives of the masses. So how do a bunch of marine biologists relate to all of this? Well, since we are superior beings, we have the control over our Panem, the wet lab. Just like the movie, districts are our holding tanks and high speed trains are water flows cascading towards the hottest district, where all our competitors await for their chance to be the next Katniss. Arduino, a kind of motherboard to which it’s possible to attach a series of different sensors and switches was used to regulate seawater temperature in our world of two districts: the hot and the cold districts. Our main goal was controlling the temperature in the tanks where our shrimp were kept overnight. This was sort of complex as we needed to have warm baths of running seawater at constant temperatur...

Sampling Tjärnö Bay

Professor Karim and Lucy after our last deployment, hurray!! Our experiments are finally finished! We were able to deploy BRUV (see our Finding Fish in Tjärnö Bay post for a description :) ) at all of our sampling locations, plus a few bonus ones. We sampled three different habitat types: sandy, muddy/algae, and harbour areas. Map of Tjärnö Bay with our sampling locations At all of our habitats we sampled at a depth of approximately 1.5 meters to assess what animals are typically found in the littoral zone of Tjärnö Bay - the littoral zone is the region of the sea closest to the shoreline. On our final day of sampling we decided to do a few extra deployments at 10 meters to search for species we didn’t find at shallower depths. We’re working on analyzing all our video footage now - stay tuned for an upcoming creature feature post! Justin and Catie setting up the cameras for deployment Since BRUV uses bait to attract fish, we also conducted snorkeling transects at all of ou...