Marine Biology

Well we’ve nearly been here a month and I’ve written a bunch of blogs about our adventures but I have yet to tell anyone what we’re doing, so here it goes.

There are 8 students from various universities in Alabama that have come to the MSS to study due to an NSF (nation science foundation) grant that my advisor received. The official class title through Auburn University is Red Sea Biology but its not a class as much as a month long seminar and research project. We have lecture from a different person every morning (I did one on techniques in population ecology) and then we spend the rest of our day working on independent research projects.

Of there 8 students there are basically 3 groups of projects. One group is doing respiration rates of the anemone and anemonefish. This project is more lab based but they all still get to dive a lot. The second group is working with zooxanthellea in the anemones. Zooxanthellea are the symbiotic algae that live in the anemones, and the students working on this take tentacle clippings from anemones from different depths, microhabitats, and light intensities to determine how algae concentration varies with the parameters. The third group is the field ecology, population dynamics group. The three students in this group have projects that overlap some but I feel like this group has more variation amongst the groups. One projected is anemone population structure (there isn’t much else you can do in this short of a time period), the second is fish population structure (also it is hard to do because of time but more possible to get size change than the anemones), and finally mine projected encompasses both of these.

To explain my project better I’ll give some quick background. In the Red Sea there is only one species of anemonefish but several species of anemone that it is mutualistic with. Of the species that the anemonefish is mutualistic with there are two species that it lives with almost all of the time. There has been anecdotal evidence that juvenile anemonfish with one species of anemone and that adult anemonefish live with the other, thus the one anemone serves as a nursery. My project is to test and see if this is true. So essentially I’m trying to answer 3 questions:
1) Do adult anemonefish only live with anemone species A or does it live with anemone species A and B?
2) If adult anemonefish only live with anemone species A then is anemone B a true nursery or simply a less preferred alternative host?
3) If anemone B is a true nursery then do anemonefish slow there growth to remain in B until there is an opening in A or do they grow continually and then die when they become too big for anemone B?
I will not be able to answer all of these questions this year but hopefully if they collected good data next year as well I will be able to answer them all. With that said I should be able to answer the first question and part of the second this year so it will feel like I have done something.

In order to do my project there are certain types of data that I needed to collected. The first was the anemone data. This is basically the same data that I collect for my thesis work so it wasn’t that hard for me too. What I collected was the sizes (length and width to create surface area) of all of the anemones in the site as well as their depth, microhabitat (if they are on sand or rock or ect.) and then how many anemonefish they host. After this I needed to collect data on all of the anemonefish in the site. This was more difficult. At this point I have collected all of the data that I could on them and I have only caught about half (~70) fish. This was mostly because it is really had to catch the fish. I spent 10 or so dives trying and I did well but to catch all of the fish it would take a month in itself. To catch the fish I had to dive with 5x4 inch nets (that you would use in an aquarium) and catch the fish with them. It turns out that the water is a 3-D environment and fish know this so they would swim like crazy in all directions so that they wouldn’t get caught, I’m actually surprised that I caught as many as I did. After I caught a fish in the nets I had to transfer the fish to a clear Ziploc bag so that I could measure it and take a picture of it. I’m pretty sure that transferring the fish was harder than catching them. This is where the fish tended to get away and I had to catch them all over again. If I managed to not let them escape I got my measurements, photograph, and then I was able to fin clip (cut of part of the dorsal fin for later identification) them and let them go. To fully answer the nursery question I need to know how much each individual fish grows over the next year, so I took pictures of most of them so that they could be individually identified next year, I don’t know if this will work but I guess we’ll find out. Another complication that we discovered is that the fish learned what the nets were so when they saw them they tried even harder to escape, this made it more difficult as time went on.

That's all on the projects. Here are bunch of cool underwater pictures that several members of the group and I took. Thanks for reading!!!!

Here is a video of me doing the worm underwater!!!!!!