Month: December 2015

[Lab News] Mumford Cove in December … an underwater view

Roughly once a month, somebody from our lab has to hop on a small institute boat and drive the 20 min over to our local field site, Mumford Cove, to exchange the sensors on our monitoring buoy. Depending on water temperature, the Eureka Probes recording temperature, salinity, pH, and oxygen in 30 min intervals are getting exchanged with another newly calibrated one with a fresh set of batteries.
As usual, Jake’s seeing this a great occasion to bring his GoPro along and have a new underwater look at the cove. What’s interesting, the dense seagrass meadows that cover the Cove’s bottom have become spotty this time of the year, and there’s much more sand visible.

[Funding] New NSF OCE grant: 3 more exciting years of work!

We are happy to announce the continued support of the National Science Foundation, Division of Biological Oceanography, which just started to fund our project about multi-stressor effects on the early life stages of fish. This is collaborative work with Prof. Janet Nye’s lab at Stony Brook University, NY, which will strengthen ties between UConn and Stony Brook Marine Sciences. The work has already started and we’re looking forward to new discoveries!

Baumann, H. and Nye, J. 2015. Collaborative research: Understanding the effects of acidification and hypoxia within and across generations in a coastal marine fish. NSF Project# 1536336 (3 years)

Learn more by accessing the NSF-OCE non-technical proposal abstract

[Lab news] Sand lance spawning

For the last 6 weeks, we housed about 100 adult sand lance (Ammodytes dubius) in our lab that Chris and Jake brought from a research cruise on Stellwagen Bank (Massachusetts Bay). We watched them visibly ripen in our tanks, and today managed to strip-spawn 10 males and 10 females, obtaining several thousands of eggs and having them develop under different CO2 conditions now.
Thumbs up, and fingers crossed for the next steps!

Sand lance embryos 1h post-fertilization
Sand lance embryos 1h post-fertilization
Sand lance embryos 1h post-fertilization
Sand lance embryos 1h post-fertilization
Squeezing milt from a running ripe male sand lance
Squeezing milt from a running ripe male sand lance

Squeezing eggs from a running ripe female sand lance
Squeezing eggs from a running ripe female sand lance