Happy New Year

It's 4am on the first day of the new year 2014! I am up and ready to go take the bus to the Taiwan Taoyuan Airport. Hannah is coming today! She had travelled a long way - from Auckland to Melbourne to Singapore, and finally after nearly 24hrs,  she is here!

New Year lunch

It's the last day of 2013. Dr. Tang bought pizza for the lab. It was an informal and fast lunch because everyone is busy with their work. We also took the opportunity to wish Xue-Ping all the best in her future endeavours. Today is her last day of work. She had helped me so much on and off during these two years... every time I am here in Taiwan for my research, whether is it field or lab work, she is here to give me a hand.

Happy new year everyone.

(Clockwise) Me "with the mask", Wei-Ling, Chia-Ling, Xue-Ping,
Hsing-Ju, Jia-Ho, Pei-Wen, Shan-Hua.

Dr. Tang, Ching-Hung, Beck

Beck, Yu-Ting, Chia-Ling

Xue-Ping

Jia-Ho

Journey Begins

I brought the dogs to "summer camp" which is what we jokingly call our friend Pras's place. It's basically doggie heaven with a creek to swim in and fields to romp through. I was a bit worried about taking both dogs on the ferry by myself, but everything went very smoothly. They were both calm and well-behaved. 'twas a Christmas miracle. I think walking to the ferry terminal helped. 

 

I am currently sitting in the Auckland Airport departure lounge. In an hour, I head to Melbourne - the real one - which makes me giggle, then Singapore, then after an 8 hour layover in Changi, Taiwan!  I am very excited to see Sonny again :)

End of field experiment (winter)

Today is the last day in NMMBA. I am leaving for Taipei tomorrow to continue the lab work. Yesterday was the last day of my tank experiment, and today is the last day of the field experiment (winter). I would still have to conduct the same field experiment again in the summer (June 2014) to compare the results. After all the hard work in the water, Wei-Jie (dive guide) snapped a few photographs of me working underwater (or rather pretending to work underwater :) ...

Working with the DivingPAM

Working with the DivingPAM 

Clearing the experimental set-ups

Taiwanese motion sickness medicine

For those you know me, you would know that I get motion sickness easily! That's one of the reason why I love cave diving so much... no gruesome boat rides! Anyway, I have always been relying on a motion sickness pill from US - a brand call Triptone. However, Triptone is rather expensive, and shipping from US is not cheap either.

After seeing me throwing up last week, one of my Taiwanese colleagues offered me a bottle of Taiwanese motion sickness drink! It is a small bottle (15mL), and you are supposed to drink the whole bottle an hour before the dive. Well, it works! And guess what, I went out and bought 10 bottles - and it costs only NZD7.50 !....

Leisure dive

Today, a few of the NMMBA colleagues went to the Nuclear Plant Inlet to do their routine surveys of the reefs. And of course, I volunteer to help. However, instead of helping, I was just there cruising around, and taking pictures of pretty little things underwater :)

Tanks experiment

Spend the whole day working on the tank experiment. Tired and lazy to write, so hope that the picture will tell the story.

Fish Tank Glamour Shots

So while Sonny is in Taiwan, we communicate via iMessage most commonly, with the occasional Skype session thrown in whenever we have time and/or are missing each other especially. However, his most asked about aspect of my life here in New Zealand without my hubby is not me, or how I'm doing, or the dogs, or how clean I am keeping the house ;) - no its the FISH TANK! At least once a day he requests updates, and asks me how this coral is doing or whether that coral is growing. So I finally gave in and took a bunch of pictures so he could see how his beloved fish tank is doing, and also as a benchmark, because its fun to look at old pictures and see how the corals grow.

The whole shebang - its actually starting to look like a proper tank

Seriatopora guttatus (Birds nest coral) is growing quite quickly - 
that split on the left just happened last week

The "Blurple" Acropora is far more strongly blue coloured at the tips than
I can capture without blasting the lights and stressing the corals

Remember that tiny piece I pulled out of the sand? Yeah the Pavona venosa
has come a long long way. Its really hard to capture how twisted
and rolled on itself it is now. Its still my favourite

I call this the "ear" coral - Turbinaria peltata

Goniopora in the front there, too bad its retracted and mushrooms in the back

Stylophora pistillata

Sunset encrusting montipora

Purple branching Montipora (left)
Purple Acropora (right) 

The yellow polyp zoanthid is also doing really well

Finally, exciting news, it now truly is a fish tank as 3 blue streak cardinals have been added!

I would like to end on the note that these photos took me three days and several hours to capture. First the lighting is an issue because corals prefer much bluer light than cameras and second, focussing through glass into water is also difficult. I took the first round of photos, got them all loaded on my computer for some color correction and realised over half weren't in focus. So I did round two, re-taking several photos, trying different angles, holding as still as possible, etc. I fared better on the second round, but still ended up doing a third round to capture a few corals that just weren't in focus. I then spent an hour or so processing all the photos trying to fix the majorly blue cast, cropping, etc. I finish all this and then take a peek at Sonny's last round for correct names and realise none of his photos are in focus.

sigh.

 I need to be less of a perfectionist methinks.

Some shots of the different creatures in the other tanks.

Xue-Ping and I were setting up the tanks today for my experiment. As always, setting up the tanks are tedious - worrying about leaks etc. You probably have heard more than enough about me complaining about how hard and frustrating setting up these tanks, so I will spare you the agony of listening to my complaints. Instead, I shall show some of the pics, courtesy of Shan-Hua as she went around and took pics of the creatures in other tanks.

Large colony of Euphyllia glabrescens (Torch coral)

Sarcophyton sp. (Toadstool coral)

Upside down jellyfish

Pterapogon kauderni (Banggai cardinal fish) 

Culturing Acropora corals

Field experiment set-up

It was an awesome or terrible day, depending on how you look at it. We - Xue-Ping (research assistant), Shan-Hua (another PhD student), Wei-Jie (Dive guide) and I went to our field site to set-up the in-situ field experiment.

There are several goals on this trip :

1)  Cover half of each coral colonies (Acropora muricata) with transparent net. There are a total of three colonies. The hope of covering half of the coral colony is to dampen the water flow around it, but not affecting the light intensity too much. Of course, there is always a cut in light intensity when you cover the coral with a net. However, I did a preliminary test in the lab using a light meter, and the light was cut about 10% - 15% on an average, and there are still some peaks which are as high as the normal lighting conditions. Thus, I am willing to accept the small change in light intensity, knowing it shouldn't impact the coral too much with this minimal light intensity change.

Setting up the nets underwater is harder than it looks

2) Collect two samples of coral nubbins from each colonies, and will extract their mucus later in the lab. I am going to analyse the microbial communities in the mucus later on in Academia Sinica, Taipei

3) Collect surrounding reef water for analysing of microbial communities.

4) Get DivingPAM readings for the coral colonies. This reading tells the photosynthetic health of the coral, and I am using it as a indicator for coral stress. I hypotheses that the half of the coral within the net should experience higher stress than the other half which is not covered. This is due to the reduction in water flow (got to do with removal of waste, radical oxygen, transport of nutrients etc).

5) Shan-Hua is going to core a couple of coral colonies for her samples. She is examining the endolithic microbial communities in Isopora sp.

Well, it is a lot of work, but it does sound pretty simple. I mean some hammering, some manoeuvring of the nets around the corals, etc but it shouldn't be hard. I WAS WRONG! Well, Wei-Jie helped with all the hard work..hammering, drilling etc. I have to in charge of the nets, the reading of the DivingPAM etc. I was the only one who knew how to operate the DivingPAM, and thus it is my job. It wasn't a difficult job - point the optic fibre on the coral branch, wait for 5 secs, fired off a light source (from the DivingPAM), and read the value yield. I do not even need to record the values because it is automatically saved in the instrument, which I can retrieve later. However, there are a few "BUTS" -

1) I need to read the dark-adapted values, which means I can only use the DivingPAM during dusk hours. And since this is the first time, I also need to do another set of light-adapted values as a baseline. So I need to go once before the sunset to read the coral colonies. As a result, there was a lot of diving, 2 dives for DivingPAM readings, 2 dives for setting the nets up. And it was a chilling 23degC, and we were shivering!

2) For the reading on the DivingPAM, I need to ensure the values fall within a certain range before I fired off the light in the fibre optics. This means that for 9 readings on a single colony, I was staring at the small screen on the DivingPAM underwater for about 10 - 15mins. So it is like reading a book in a moving car - I got really SICK... and I throw up after every use of the DivingPAM!

Again, harder than it looks...especially when the current is going

Well, first day is over, and I got what I need for my samples...two more collection days to go!

All in a day's work

And now, for some surfing on the web...

Shan-Hua (left), Xue-Ping (right)