Have you ever wondered about the secret life of deep sea fishes? Or what the inside of a whale looks like? Have you touched one of the largest sea slugs in the world? Well, visitors to this year’s Open House at MLML got a chance to do all of this and more! Over the course of this two day event students, faculty, and staff opened their labs and their minds to over 2300 visitors of all ages from around the Monterey Bay area. If you missed it come on a tour with me and walk through the labs. At the first stop we see a large mahi mahi fish and skeletons of local and far away fish.
Fish skeleton to be viewed but not touched in the Ichthyology LabMahi Mahi on display at Open House
The CTD is a much used tool in the world of oceanography. We send it up and down the ocean, from surface to bottom, gathering data and water samples. As depth increases, so does the pressure. And a fun way to demonstrate the crushing pressure of a 1000 meters of water, is to literally crush things! Sending some decorated Polystyrene coffee cups along for a ride is a bit of a tradition on oceanographic cruises. The result? Some very tiny coffee cups to place upon your desk and remind you of your adventures at sea.
Physical Oceanography Student Diane Wyse, proudly displays student art.Phycology student, Sarah Jeffries demonstrates one way to reduce caffeine consumption.After the hydrostatic pressure squeeze.
MLML’s annual Open House is fast approaching and our students are busy trying to make sure everything goes off without a hitch. One of our main attractions is the marine adventure themed puppet show. Students invite the audience to dive into the ocean with a much anticipated, “Welcome to the Moss Landing Marine Labs Open House Puppet show!” This puppet show aims to teach the audience about the ocean and get them really excited about studying and conserving it.
To learn more about how the creators of this year’s show feel about the show I asked each of them a few questions.
What is the best thing about the puppet show?
Nicole: The creative process that brings the whole show together; writing songs, developing choreography, crafting sets and props, all for the purpose of educating visitors about marine life in a super fun way!!
Marilyn: The best part of the show for me has to be people coming up afterwards to tell us how much they learned from and enjoyed the show, especially when we're able to reach both kids and adults. It means a lot when we're able to communicate crazily complex scientific concepts to everyone in a fun and accurate way. And the singing and dancing, of course. And writing the songs. Wait. That was more than one best thing...
Docked in the Carquinez Strait, an offshoot of the San Pablo Bay in the city of Vallejo, is the TS Golden Bear. It is a training ship for the California Maritime Academy, which—like MLML—is a campus of the California State University. The Biological Oceanography lab at MLML utilizes the ship for ballast water research. As ships traverse the globe, they pick up ballast water from one area and release it back into the ocean once they reach their destination. Ships uptake seawater into their ballast tanks to optimize balance and streamlining when traveling a great distance. During this process, potentially invasive planktonic organisms are brought into the tanks and transported by being held in the ballast tank during travels. As these organisms are released back into the ocean, they are now introduced into a new environment.
The TS Golden Bear, which houses the laboratory and is the source of ballast water used in the research conducted by the MLML Biological Oceanography lab.Ships take in seawater and store it in ballast tanks in order to remain balanced as they glide through the oceans. Then, they discharge the ballast water as they enter a port or harbor.
This can pose a problem, as some plankton can become invasive, meaning that they can outcompete native organisms in a habitat. According to Ruiz, et al., shipping is considered the largest transfer mechanism for coastal invasions. As a result, regulations developed by IMO (International Maritime Organization) are implemented to reduce invasive plankton. One of their requirements forces ships to reduce the number of live zooplankton to 10 live zooplankters per 1000 liters after the water has been treated with a kill-factor (toxic reagents, oxygen reduction, UV light, heat, etc). “Though the challenge of coming up with an effective but environmentally safe kill factor is still up and coming, so are the methods to determining the quality of the treatment system,” says Julie Kuo, a student in the Biological Oceanography Lab. Consequently, this has enhanced the collaboration between engineers, and scientists to construct standard operating procedures to determine the quality of a treatment system based on IMO regulations.
Copepods, tintinnids, rotifers, and cladocera are all zooplankton that can be found in ballast water.
Enter Dr. Welshmeyer and the Biological Oceanography lab: the purpose of their project is to count the number of live zooplankton alive before and after the treatment. This process is used to determine whether or not the treatment tested on the Golden Bear is successful at meeting the IMO regulations. As we boarded the ship, we carried microscopes and coffee down through the ship to a room that was designated as our lab. In the 8 by 15 foot room, we setup our microscopes and began counting zooplankton. That particular day, we were counting pre-treated water, which was full of zooplankton swimming around; this included tintinnids, copepods, rotifers, and nauplii. After our counts of the live and dead zooplankton, we extrapolated that there were anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 live organisms per cubic meter; up to 60% were alive in an untreated sample that was concentrated from one cubic meter of water from the Carquinez Strait. So, treatment systems have to be incredibly affective in order to kill all but ten zooplankton in ballast water!
Julie Kuo, a graduate student in the Biological Oceanography lab at MLML, counts the number of zooplankton in a sample of pre-treated ballast water.
One great aspect of being a graduate student in the invertebrate zoology lab at MLML is that we get the chance to take care of various invertebrates in our aquarium room. Currently, we have anemones, mussels, crabs, and sea stars living in our tanks. One of the sea stars, called a sunflower star (Pycnopodia helianthoides), is special and gets its own tank for a number of reasons. Firstly, the sunflower star is the largest sea star in the world, and can grow up to one meter in length. Sunflower stars generally have 15 to 24 arms, which is more arms than any other species. They are also the heaviest sea star and can weigh up to 5 kilograms, which is about 11 pounds. So we like to give our big star plenty of room to roam around - sunflower stars are fast and can move up to one meter per minute!
Many sunflower stars (Pycnopodia helianthoides) living in a kelp forest. Sunflower stars are the largest sea star and can be many different colors.
Below is a video of our sunflower star, and you will be able to see various distinctive features. Along its arms are tube feet, which operate by hydraulic pressure and are part of the water vascular system that facilitates respiration, movement, and feeding. Sunflower stars generally have about 15,000 tube feet! In the center of the body, you can see a white spot, or madreporite, which is a water filter for the vascular system. The blue nodules on the sea star are called pedicellaria, which are pincers on the body wall and are used for protection; if you put your hand on them, it feels like Velcro!
