I've been putting animals in big tanks and putting them in the -20 cold room and seeing where the ice forms on them. We're interested in whether ice nucleates off the tissue, just gets stuck to the organism, and whether it falls off. It doesn't seem to nucleate off the seastars very quickly but if I leave them in the tank for awhile, they get ice crystals all over the tips of their arms and a few that come up off their backs. Dennis wrote a great blog entry for the course on our project.
I've been making i
ce in still water and in mixed water, and when you mix the water, little ice crystals called frazil ice form in the water and then get stuck on animals, lots of sponges, quite a bit on urchins, but very little on seastars. It seems to fall off the urchins pretty easily though, and they move their spines around to knock it off, which is pretty cool to watch.I get to go back to Cape Evans tomorrow (weather permitting) to be a dive tender for Jim and Connor who are going to collect some algae.
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