Tidepool nutrient cycling manipulations

Summer number 1 of our collaborative research project with the Bracken and Martiny lab groups at UC Irvine is proceeding nicely. Our teams have been manipulating mobile grazers, such as limpets, littorine snails, chitons, and hermit crabs, in experimental tidepools in order to measure the growth responses of the photosynthetic algae in these pools (among many other variables we are measuring). Those algae need to take up nutrients from the tidepool water in order to grow, including nitrogen products, which the herbivore grazers just happen to be recycling through their urine as they eat other algae in the pools.
[caption id=”attachment_2440″ … Continue Reading