These past few weeks have been full of cleaning the lab, mainly, and getting our equipment ready. Lets just say I'm an expert at cleaning the systems and they look sparkly clean! The past few weeks we have been doing incubations with the coralline algae looking at pH, DO and temperature. We also measured the algae after it had respiration time to see how the algae responded to photosynthesis. My mentor and I had been waiting for CO2 cylinders for about two weeks. We have them now and have been testing the equipment with the CO2 in the water. Some of the equipment wasn't working properly, such as the CO2 meter. Getting the meter looked at tomorrow and hopefully it will be reading properly because its time to start these experiments!
We originally had CO2 going into our sump and the CO2 wasn't going in the water long enough. Leigh built a cylinder that has the air stone in the bottom and incoming water coming in from the top (left). This makes the bubbles move up through the water against the current and this air bubbles stay in the water longer. Since this change everything has started to come together and after the CO2 cylinders arrived we have started to circulate the water with CO2 from the sump into the whole system.
I'm excited to see how this experiment will go and looking forward to help get it going. The experiment should start this week if we get the CO2 meter fixed and I will post a new blog about it soon.
We originally had CO2 going into our sump and the CO2 wasn't going in the water long enough. Leigh built a cylinder that has the air stone in the bottom and incoming water coming in from the top (left). This makes the bubbles move up through the water against the current and this air bubbles stay in the water longer. Since this change everything has started to come together and after the CO2 cylinders arrived we have started to circulate the water with CO2 from the sump into the whole system. 
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