GeniAlg

GENIALG

Monitoring biodiversity of a seaweed aquaculture site

During the second half of my professional practice, I transitioned to working with samples from the GENIALG project. To the left is an abbreviated version of a presentation given by my supervisor that explains some of the aims, methods and outcomes of the project. I worked with samples of colonized "droppers" which were 1-meter ropes that hung down from a longline growing kelp. Some had been seeded with kelp prior to installation on the long line while others were unseeded. The droppers had been naturally colonized by "fouling" organisms, mainly mussels and polychaetes.

See a video of the full GENIALG presentation here or click here to learn more about the project

Droppers seeded with kelp

Seaweed hatchery process

Kelp on the long line

Underwater view

Processing a GENIALG sample

In the photos above, you can see what the droppers looked like as they were seeded with kelp and installed on the aquaculture farm. The dropper samples that I processed consisted of the 1-meter rope and all the fauna that had colonized it while it was on the farm. They were stored in plastic bags with ethanol as a preservative. When starting a new sample, I would empty the contents of the bag over a 500 micron sieve, remove fauna from the rope, and rinse with water to loosen the smaller organisms in the sample. Using a dissecting microscope, I sorted most of the fauna into major phyla including including Crustacea, Mollusca, and Annelida. As the samples were dominated with Mytilus edulis (common mussels) and a type of tube-building annelid from the genus Spirobranchus, these individuals were sorted and counted separately.

Acquired Skills

Laboratory Skills

Processing samples for the GENIALG project required identifying fauna under a dissecting microscope and carefully preserving sorted samples in ethanol. This added to my experience working with microscopes and following laboratory safety protocols (and gave me an excuse to wear a fancy lab coat).

Species Identification using Dichotomous Keys

Using the dichotomous keys provided, I gained experience in species identification and learned to be observant and methodical.