Wine region

Today we leave the sea behind and we travel inland!  We are visiting the vineyard "Viña Viu Manent", in the Colchagua region (wine region). Salud con vinos viu!

Sampling day: T7

The experiment is running nicely. On the first day we added different additions of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) in the ratios 16 and 3. Nitrogen is the limiting nutrient and and when it starts to be depleted growth of the algae slows down and stops. This is what is happening now in our tanks, and more so in the low N:P ratio - just as expected :-)

Growth in the dinoflagellate dominated cubitainers

An evening walk around the station

Patterns in the sand

The different communities

Tobias has started counting the samples and we have 3 different communities: two diatom dominated and one dinoflagellate dominated. The two diatom dominated ones differ in that the first is dominated by Chaetoceros sp. (with a loto of Dinobryon sp. as well) and the other is dominated by Thalassiosira sp and with some Chaetoceros sp as well.

Counting algal cells using an inverted microscope

Thalassiosira sp.

The sampling day is over and the sun is going down

Status: one of the treatments have reached the chlorophyll peak and the other treatments seem to follow soon. There also seem to be a growing copepod population that probably have a good time at the moment with plenty of food.

 a bit of cheating as this picture is from yesterday and today it is grey

Another sampling day

It seems like the algae are growing and behaving as expected. Our goal was to have three different communities in the cubitainers and we have succeeded in finding water with different initial conditions. Crossing fingers for this to keep up.

Taking the samples

Sampling for bacteria

Filtration, one of the main jobs during the experiment

Visit to Pablo Neruda's house

As there were no sampling today we made a short visit to the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda's house, which is situated a few km from the station. Neruda won the Nobel prize in literature in 1971 and is one of the best known poets in Spanish literature:

'quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos' Pablo Neruda