1/18/14

Today was Saturday, I don't usually go on Saturdays but I'm going to be busy Sunday so I went today instead. So I started off with prepping the squid and smelt for Sunday and Wednesday feeding. Then I cleaned some of the tanks and prepped the kelp for the Red Abalone. I also spent time in the front, talking to the public about Abalone, Brine Shrimp and the aquarium in general. I always like working the front, it's nice talking with people and seeing the kids excitement to learn. I also got to help bag moon jellies for shipping, that was sort of cool.

1/05/14

Today was a data collecting day. I did the whole food prep, video taping before feeding, feeding, video taping after feeding, draining the tanks and then taking pictures and filling them back up again. Then I recorded my data and used imageJ. The rest of the day was the usual, cleaning tanks and feeding.

Blog 11

1.   Where are you doing your mentorship?
The Aquatic Nursery at the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium

2.   Who is your contact?
Andres Carillo

3.   How many total hours have you done (total hours should be reflected in your mentorship log located on the right hand side of your blog like your WB)?
I need to update my log, but I've done 112 hours

4.   Summarize the 10 hours of service you did.
I did the extra hours of mentoring for mine. Most of it was dedicated to my Olive Rockfish project and working on my first answer. I learned how to make larval buckets, about the importance of brine shrimp, rotifers and algae and how to prepare food. I also learned different way to feed them. During my time I learned the importance of diet and how it can effect the growth of fish in their early development.

5.   Email your house teacher the name of your contact and their phone number confirming who they should call to verify it. 

Blog 10: The Holiday

1.  It is important to consistently work on your senior project, whether it is break or we are in school.  What did you over the break with your senior project?
Over break I worked on my Olive Rockfish project, learning how to collect my data and use the program ImageJ to calculate what I needed. I also learned about new types of feeding methods and what factors to consider to get fish to eat better under semi-stressful conditions. I also worked on my research, reading about fish behavior in captivity, feeding habits and about different types of tanks.

2.  What was the most important thing you learned from what you did and why?  What was the source of what you learned?
One of the most important things I learned would be to profile your organism. You MUST know what habitat it needs, what sort of nutrition it requires in its diet, how fast will it grow and its relative size. For example, let's take habitat. You should know the required water temperature, air flow, if it needs cover or not, gravel, plants, how big of a tank, etc. I learned this from research, my mentor and especially my Olive Rockfish project since I had to build my own tanks for that.

3.  If you were going to do a 10 question interview on questions related to answers of your EQ, who would you talk to and why?
I would talk to Andres, Kiersten, or Nicole because all of them are quite knowledgeable about my topic. They've all helped me a lot so far in my senior project and thinking of answers.

12/05/14

Today I didn't need to collect data so I only had to feed my Olive Rockfish. Oh my gosh I find them flipping adorable! All of them ate well today except for Sellwood who ate NOTHING and P-51 who did not eat 0.6 grams of his food. Then I got to feed some of the leftover smelt and squid to the rockshrimp and other rockfish we have. The juvenile rockfish, we have Splitnose and Flag, seemed more than happy to wolf it down. They're really cute. Anyways, then we needed to make a sign for the Splitnose and Flag so I tried my hand at that. The drawings came out okay but my hand writing is pretty bad so Nicole said she could write down all the information on it. Then I did some cleaning and P.M. feedings. Oh, and in the morning I did jelly lab and one of the covers on the Sea Nettle tank fell in.... but the people at the desk were really nice about it and called in one of the aquarists to fish out.

12/29/13

I took my data again today, only this time it went a lot smoother and I actually knew what i was doing. And because I finished a lot quicker, I had time to actually learn how to use ImageJ. It was a lot easier than I'd thought it would be honestly. So with ImageJ I was able to calculate the length and girth of my olive rockfish. Now I'm taking the videos of them and making charts for each fish about certain types of movements in time increments of 10 seconds.

12/22/13

Today I did not need to take data for my Olive Rockfish so I just fed them each their assigned food. Otherwise I helped with a.m. and p.m. feedings, cleaning tanks, dumping barrels and prepping food for my rockfish for the Wednesday feeding.

12/15/13

Today I officially started my olive rockfish project. I went to the aquarist ally and got frozen smelt and a box of frozen squid. While the smelt was easy to thaw, just had to put it in a pitcher of water, the squid was not. I had to let it sit until it became soft enough to cut out one from the block. I actually had to have help with this because I wasn't really sure how to do it at first. Then I had to prepare them. I gutted the smelt and chopped the two up. I had to measure out 0.5 grams smelt, 0.5 grams squid and then 0.5 squid and smelt. Then I had to remove the plants from their tanks and replace it with my inch graphs. I had to be careful though because they jump when they're scared. After this I video taped each for one minute before feeding. Then I fed each fish their assigned food with a feeding stick. Then I took video footage again of each for one minute. Then I drained the tanks until they were low and took pictures of each fish and their graph. Then I filled the tanks back up fully. This all took a really long time because it was my first time doing this all. Andres and I decided that since my fish were bigger than we had originally thought they'd be, we changed the grams of food from 0.5 grams to 1.0 grams.

Olive Rockfish Week 3 Length/Girth (in inches)

1. Ulrich Mohr
   Length:3.526
   Girth: 0.491
2. A.V. Sellwood
   Length: 3.984
   Girth: 0.616
3. Atlantis
   Length: 3.614
   Girth: 0.590
4. Komet
   Length:3.674
   Girth: 0.581
5. M-18
   Length: 3.757
   Girth: 0.569
6. Tirana
   Length: 4.112
   Girth: 0.648
7. B-17
   Length: 3.800
   Girth: 0.600
8. T-34
   Length: 3.700
   Girth: 0.600
9. P-51
   Length: 3.500
   Girth: 0.530

Olive Rockfish Profiles

These are the names of my Olive Rockfish, so in future posts if I call them by number or name you may refer back to here

1. Ulrich Mohr
2. A.V. Sellwood
3. Atlantis
4. Komet
5. M-18
6. Tirana
7. B-17
8. T-34
9. P-51
   

12/08/13

Okay, so I've obviously been neglecting to post my blogs so prepare for the onslaught.Today I was supposed to start my project with the Olive Rockfish, but due to some complications I have to wait until next week. So instead I went to a bio-statistics workshop up in the library. This was actually pretty interesting and helped me figure out  how to interpretate and present my collected data. Besides that, it was pretty much a normal day. I did a.m. feedings, helped with cleaning and p.m. feedings.