Introduction
The seawater on coral reefs tends to have low concentrations of many nutrients that sponges and corals, which are the main reef builders, need to survive. Because of these low nutrient concentratio...
The results are in, the paper is out, and another sponge secret is unlocked!
Hello! I know it has been a while since we have posted an update, but we have been diligently working on data analysis and discussing our findings with other coral reef scientists and we have excit...
Sponges do more than remove nutrients from the water
We have some exciting updates to share about our project. Our main goal for this project is to characterize how sponge filtration changes the composition of organic nutrients that are dissolved in ...
A closer look at sponge symbionts
Just like we have bacteria that live on our skin and in our guts that help keep us healthy, sponges also host a diverse community of bacteria that make up a healthy sponge. In our project we looked...
Samples Have Been Run!
Now it is time for the exciting part of data analysis. The data we get from our instruments need to be processed and analyzed before we can work on interpreting what the results mean for nutrient a...
Update on Sample Analysis- April 17
Hi Everyone,We wanted to let you know that we have finished extracting dissolved organic matter from our water samples and we are preparing to run these extracts on our instruments (mass spectromet...
What's in a mass?
We are analyzing the extracted dissolved organic matter (DOM) from our water samples using mass spectrometry. The goal of this is to figure out what molecules are in the pool of organic nutrients o...
Update on Sample Analysis
Good news - we have completed almost all of the extractions of dissolved organic matter from the water samples! We have also scheduled time on the instruments we use (mass spectrometers) to run the...
Why Do We Care About Dissolved Organic Matter (and What Is It)?
We have our three types of water samples ready for processing to extract out the dissolved organic matter:1) "Ambient" or "Inhalent" water, which was collected near the sponges that we sampled 2) "...