Who showed up for dinner?

Welcome back! Since the last post we’ve been quite busy because our experiments have now officially started.

What have we been up to?
We decided on our locations for the deployments of the cameras and since yesterday we have been filming everything that comes up to try and eat the (crushed) mussels we leave for them!
Every day we split up in three groups: one goes on the boat for harder to reach sites, one stays on land for the two different harbours and the last one will get to stay warm and dry (analysing videos, writing movie ideas, etc.).

What have we seen?
Loads of animals!
To minimize error, we take the count of the frame with the most individuals of each species in it to prevent double counting (in case fish/other want to appear lots of times in the video).
Here’s a few examples:

What about the upcoming days?
Tomorrow will be our last day with BRUV (we’re all already crying).
On Sunday we will try and see fish with a video snorkel transect (we’ll just swim in a line and film it) for each of our 6 sites.
The rest of the time we’ll analyse all the videos and data gathered, as well as writing our final report and creating a video!

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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...

IMBRSea Joint School - Adventures at the Swedish Coast

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