Bunk bedded room with blue comforter on lower bed, geometric patterned blue rug and a pair of maple brown chest of drawers In my last post, I mentioned we typically do water chemistry in the morning and save the afternoon for dives and other activities. What are these other activities I spoke of? Read on if you’re wondering what’s the buzz and what’s a-happenin’ at Palmer.

Two brown seaweeds with smaller, red seaweeds on the side. Photo by B.J. Baker.I’ve been spending my last posts talking about diving and am still are not quite yet done with the topic. But I thought that this time I’d talk a bit about what we see on those dives. I might just as well start with what we see most, which are macroalgae (or "seaweeds", which means pretty much the same thing as "macroalgae").

A couple of weeks ago, we were able to start our main experiment for this field season that took nearly two months to set up. While this was a super exciting accomplishment, our team’s work is far from over. There are certain tasks (like titrations, spec work, and molt collecting, oh my!) that need to be completed daily. These tasks not only help ensure that our pH treatments are correctly set, but also allow us to collect some of our data throughout the experiment. Today, I am going to walk you through a typical workday for experiment maintenance.

In my previous All Creatures entry I introduced you to two local stars – seastars that is-  in the waters around Palmer Station.   As members of the phylum Echinodermata, sea stars have a large and diverse extended family, as the opening image reflects. 

A five-armed purple sea star rests along a similarly colored short spined urchin partially covered in algae; below the pair stretching across the image a brownish sea cucumber and below a longer, less densely spined pencil urchin

water samplingIf you’ve read Addie’s latest post, then you know that the experiment is now officially underway! Read on to find out more about the water chemistry we do each day and why.