The past four weeks have been pretty slow in comparison to the rest of the time this experiment was being carried out. If you couldn’t tell from the title of this particular post, these past weeks have pretty much been damage assessment and cleanup protocol. This is why I was not able to recover anything biological because I have reached 100% mortality rate and I am not able to continue the tests. After considering where I am in the semester and where I will have to be in the experiment, I have decided to close up shop.
After a lot of conversation with a variety of different people, I have made the decision to disassemble the experiment. This decision was not easy to make, but it was what is best for the equipment and for the experiment. The greatest limiting factor is time. There is not enough time remaining for me to try and setup the experiment again with new corals because by the time I start to collect data again, graduation will be upon me. However, this is not the end of the experiment as a whole, which brings me to my next point.
I have decided to dedicate my remaining time with this semester preparing the next generation of this experiment. With that being said, I will be making decisions on who exactly will be taking over this assignment after I leave. I want to make sure that the next caretaker understands the opportunity that is being presented with this setup. Now that I have done the research and sourcing of equipment, the next person just has to focus on the actual experiment instead of worrying about the nitty gritty details of the setup.
After deciding who it is that will be taking over the experiment, I will have to catch them up on what exactly happened and what to look out for when replicating this test. I will do this by presenting the data that I collected over the past two semesters and fill them in on what exactly it will take to keep this experiment up and running.
If there is anyone in the area that is trying to get started into the coral hobby, please check out this website.
I want to leave you all with a quotation: “Do we really care so little about the Earth on which we live that we don’t want to protect one of the world’s greatest wonders from the consequences of our behavior?” -Sir David Attenborough
Some pictures from the experiment in its prime:
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