tina tuesday at skio!

 

It was a dark and stormy night - as Snoopy would have written! 

Still, I had braved the weather for this special presentation at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, as did a few other stalwart souls.

Good for us!

There were four researchers who participated in the "Open Lab Night", though I only had time to visit three of them.

I might have been able to see all four, as well as tour the Research Vessel Savannah, but I took the time to ask questions about the science going on out there.

It's amazing!!!

Remember, I once thought I would go to college for marine science?

Well, I had no idea fifty years ago of the many different aspects of that field!

As per the advice of Jackson when I arrived, I started in Building 2, which had two Open Labs.

The first was the Bio-Optics and Satellite Oceanography Lab of Dr. Sara Rivero-Calle, right inside the building entrance.

How very fortunate for me!!!

See that device she's holding?

That's the Cubesat known as SeaHawk-1, which was in a low-Earth orbit from 2018 until 2023, gathering eighteen images a day as it swept around the planet taking color photos of 200 km x 700 km swaths of the oceans.

WOW.

But here's the fascinating part of all that.

She's building a spectral data bank of the types of phytoplankton out there, much as organic chemists have for identifying proteins, lipids, and carbohydrate molecules.

WOW.

Right now, they're in the data analysis mode for all the images SeaHawk-1 sent back during its five years in orbit.

That will certainly occupy her crew for quite a while!

Then I was down the hall and around the corners to the office of the newest member there, Dr. Nicholas Foukal.

His work is more physics-based, concentrating on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, aka AMOC.

Basically, he's studying the effect of ice melt off Greenland on the salinity and density of the water mixing with the Gulf Stream as it loops back down toward northern Europe.

WOW. 

The only things in his office are pictures of Greenland, where he will be going at the end of the month, to spend September doing measurements and calculations, as physicists do.

Basically, he's trying to sort out whether the British Isles are headed for an ice age, given the decreases in sea temperature caused by climate change.

WOW.

By the way, he liked my little flip phone.

(smile!)

So far, I'd spent over an hour in this one building.

That left me about 30 minutes to speak with one other, so over to Building 17.

Dr. Marc Frischer does the kind of research I always think of with marine science: the study of microbial activity on actual marine animals in the ocean.

Namely, his work is with shrimp and the Black Gill disease they get from a ciliate fungus called Fusurium solani, one similar to the ciliate that causes ich in aquariums, as I discovered when I asked him about it.

WOW.

Just like with that disease, there is a treatment that can be used to rid small batches of shrimp of the fungi, to allow them to have a 'control' group for their studies.

That's the only way to get shrimp without Black Gill, as 70-100% have the disease at this time of year.

WOW.

The disease is not harmful to humans, except in as much as it affects the livelihood of local shrimpers, which is serious, considering that Black Gill causes the shrimp to die of suffocation, essentially.

He mentioned that shrimp have a similar ciliate that attaches to their gills, but it doesn't eat its way down into their circulatory system.

I asked if there was a way to saturate the water with that ciliate, as it goes for the same 'receptor' site, so to speak, but he said those two ciliates are often both found on the same shrimp, as they are not competitive.

Drats... but that certainly was a lively conversation!

I'm glad I got the chance to pull out some biochemistry.

(smile!) 

Plus, I was there almost 40 minutes.

Those of us still there actually got kicked out, as we were past the designated time limit for the Open Lab Night.

What a great place to get kicked out of!

(smile!)