Editing Monika Bright's Lab

==en:==
University of Vienna


===Piran===
====Emissions in social networks====
<blockquote>We - Juliana, Renate, Teresa and myself - are back in Piran to continue our animal succession during wood degradation study. The dolphins were greeting us on our first morning.</blockquote>
(Video to be included here)

<blockquote>Our plan

To follow the process of colonization and succession of life on wood and to study the process of wood degradation we deployed our custom-designed BiOlogical Recruitment Grids (BORGs) last summer. The three sites we chose were 1) the canal Lera of the Secovlje Salina Nature Park (http://www.kpss.si/en/intro ), 2) the shallow subtidal area of the Strunjan Landscape Park (https://www.naravniparkislovenije.si/…/strunjan-landscape-p…), and 3) in front of the Marine Biology Station in Piran (https://www.nib.si/mbp/en/).

Now we are back to collect the first cubes of wood and plastic from each BORG.</blockquote>
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<blockquote>Secovlje Salina Nature Park (http://www.kpss.si/en/intro)</blockquote>
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<blockquote>Teresa gets ready</blockquote>
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<blockquote>Canal Lera - the deployment of the BORG is s
quite shallow but still too deep to recovery the wooden and plastic cubes, take sediment cores and water samples comfortably without SCUBA diving. Tihomir Makovec, Miljan Sisko and Matej Marinac from the Marine Biology Station of Piran help us.</blockquote>
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<blockquote>This is how the BORG looked like last summer</blockquote>
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<blockquote>This is how it looks now. Tihomir took this picture and all the other underwater pictures.</blockquote>
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<blockquote>Check out the difference between the wooden cubes heavily overgrown by bryozoans the the plastic cubes. Shipworms and dribbles have already colonized the wood.</blockquote>
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<blockquote>We had back to the institute after a successful first sampling trip</blockquote>
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<blockquote>If you think we are always working you are wrong</blockquote>
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<blockquote>The wooden cubes were covered with bryozoans ...</blockquote>
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<blockquote>and diverse sea squirts and anemone</blockquote><gallery>
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<blockquote>Work in and out of the water in front of the Marine Biology Institute in Piran</blockquote><gallery>
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<blockquote>This is the BORG in about 4 m depth in front of the institute. Also here we recovered three wooden and one plastic cube.</blockquote>
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<blockquote>Another successful recovery</blockquote>
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<blockquote>collection of cubes, water and sediment</blockquote><gallery>
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<blockquote>Wood eating creatures 

<blockquote>Wood gets degraded by bacteria and fungi but also by animals. While shipworms live in symbiosis with wood degrading, nitrogen fixing bacteria, some isopods and amphipods can digest wood without the help of symbionts. After sampling the wooden cubes we took pictures of all surfaces. The surface of this wooden plate was covered by hydozoans and algae. Only from the inside the occurrence of many shipworms became apparent.</blockquote>
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<blockquote>We found all kinds of size classes ranging from less than a few mm to almost 10 cm. This indicates several colonization events, known in Teredo navalis, the species we found here.</blockquote>
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<blockquote>All wooden cubes were heavily infested with the amphipod Chelura terebrans (orange) but we detected only a few specimens of Limnoria quadripunctata (white with 4 spots at the rear end).</blockquote>

(Video to be included here)
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<blockquote>The colonial ciliate Zoothamnium on wood
In collaboration with Branko Cermelj and with the help of Tihomir Makovec we started to measure pH and redox, oxygen and sulfide concentrations found on woodsurfaces with microelectrodes. The goal is to better understand the microhabitat of the co-occurring Zoothamnium species. Zoothamnium niveum has never been found in winter, but we detected another Zoothamnium species on a wood block. Whether this is the aposymbiotic form of Z. niveum, Z. ignavum or Z. alternans we do not know yet. They all look very similar. We fixed them for sequencing in Vienna.</blockquote>
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<blockquote>BORG 3 in Strunjan

<blockquote>This is our most shallow sampling site. Renate and Teresa were in the 12 degree cold water to collect the cubes, sediment cores and seawater.</blockquote>
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<blockquote>Work in the lab - Juliana processes the sediment cores in the vicinity of the BORGs. These samples will serve to compare the communities colonizing the wood with communities living in the adjacent sediment.</blockquote>
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<blockquote>Work in the lab - Teresa opens the cubes and plates are Juliana takes pictures.</blockquote>
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<blockquote>Work in the lab - identification and sampling of animals is done by Renate and Monika</blockquote>
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<blockquote>Work in the lab - taking swabs of surface for sequencing</blockquote>
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<blockquote>Work in the lab - Renate put the wooden plates in MgCl2 for relaxation of animals prior sieving the water through a 32 micrometer net to fix all meio- and microfauna animals</blockquote>
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<blockquote>Work in the lab - in the end the wood blocks are submerged in ethanol and sealed in plastic bags</blockquote>
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<blockquote>more nice animals - polychaete in calcareous tube</blockquote>
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<blockquote>baby crab</blockquote>
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<blockquote>sponge and hydrozoan</blockquote>
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<blockquote>There are so many interesting and beautiful animals - one of the reasons why I like to come here to the Marine Biology Station in Piran  (https://www.nib.si/mbp/en/).  Many thanks to   Branko Cermelj, Tihomir Makovec, Miljan Sisko and Matej Marinac for their support. 
... and this is the main reason why I like to come here</blockquote>
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