The move is done!
After 2 months of hard work, we have finally completed (almost) all of our new office. We’re up to 6 jellyfish systems, a new polyp tank system, and soon also a coral system. All the time and energy we’ve spent on this new office has certainly paid off, ive personally found it much easier to work in our new space. Its clear our experience and skill with system and design has increased significantly. One of my favorite parts of the new setup is the aforementioned polyp mini-system.
Before, we kept all of our polyps in jars. While this was very space efficient and allowed us to keep many many different strains and colonies across many different species, since they weren’t filtered at all they had to be given a full water change twice every week. It would take us nearly 7 hours to complete all the water changes! We still of course have some polyp jars but these mostly keep our less important polyp cultures (whether the species was in lower demand, we can’t get them to strobilate or we have other better colonies of the same species). Our new polyp systems allows us to keep larger mother colonies which include some bio media for denitrification and overflows into a common drain to allow us to complete all the water changes in about 5 minutes.
One of the things we are focussing on in our new lab is maintaining water quality without constantly doing water changes. We no longer have access to seawater in our new office so we have to mix our own. While this is not a new huge problem for home aquarists, making this much RO water for a lab of this size wastes a lot of water. Aside from being ecologically wasteful, it also costs a whole lot. So we are trying to maintain water quality without water changes and instead with nutrient export and dosing elements. Stay tuned for another blog post on this exact topic!
Thanks to our new poylp setup we can also begin much higher quality expriments on polyps, we are looking to further understand what triggers or excasterbates the processes of repilaction and strobilation.
one of our strategies to handle nutrient export
Overall, this new move has been a resounding success. Our new lab looks phenominal and our new design of the place allows us to keep even more jellyfish easily. As much fun as the move was, I’m so thankful its over because it was a slog. Thankfully, we plan on staying here for a long while and we’ve really set ourselves up for that long term success.
Thanks to everyone for being so patient with us during this hectic time! Things will only get better from here 🙂
