successful day in the lab

Today we managed to make ice using several different methods! It seems like the most promising is using a pipet to nucleate an ice crystal... the ice just grows straight out from the pipet tip so we can direct it toward an organism. I seem to have found myself doing the Antarctic version of what I do at home... working in a cold room trying to torture animals. The Antarctic version involves a -20C cold room instead of my usual 11C, which is WAY colder and requires us to wear our puffy red jackets (commonly known here as "big red"). Oh yeah, and ice instead of jello. We also made ice in a metal can... it formed around the bottom ridge. Then this afternoon Dennis and I went and watched/helped Jim and the dive instructor go diving for invertebrates for us to try to freeze. Part of me was jealous that they got to go in the water and part of me was glad it wasn't me, especially when Jim (sitting with yellow fins) came up with a leaked glove. Ouch! The visibility was only 10' so the divers used a tether so they didn't lose each other or the hole. The amazing visibility you see in photos occurs much earlier in the season... now the phytoplankton have bloomed and Jim said it was like night diving because there was so much snow on top of the ice. He got a huge nudibranch, some sponges, sea stars, pycnogonids (sea spiders). The pycnogonids here are amazing... when I saw one in CA it was really tiny, much smaller than a dime. They're enormous here! Need to get a photo with one of Dennis's scale bars but here's one I took a couple days ago in the touch tank.