WORKING AS A RESEARCH SPECIALIST AT BIOSPHERE 2

This summer I am super excited to be interning at Biosphere 2 with their Ocean system. I completed my safety walk today, which basically means I know how to get out of the Biosphere and where to find a fire extinguisher. My first day in action will be Friday. I will be shadowing an employee to learn what their day to day tasks are. I also discussed with my supervisor, Katie, what oppurtunities there are here for me to get involved with. I can't wait to see what I can accomplish here!

I learned a lot of things today. I shadowed with Franklin. He is a staff member of the Marine Lab and has been at B2 for 10 years. He showed me all the daily tasks that I will be helping with. Highlights of the day were feeding the koi fish in the aquaponics system, replacing rocks in the urchin tank on the beach for algae covered ones so they had something to eat, and placing a trap in the rain forest pond to catch and save some minnows before the pond is drained! I also helped take a water sample of the ocean surface and got to use liquid nitrogen in the lab!

The rainforest pond is going to be drained. Katie sent Franklin and I to try and save as many minnows as we can! Here is Franklin setting the trap. It's actually a crayfish trap, so we hope it will be able to catch some minnows.

I explored the Biosphere on my own for the first time. The experience was both thrilling and confusing. I haven't yet figured out the best way to get from place to place and I reached 6000 steps in the first hour from wandering around so much! My morning began with feeding the marine lab fish and filling their tanks. I spilled water everywhere because the bucket I chose to use had a hole. I also tended to the aquaponics system. Sadly, a small koi fish had died and I had to bury him. RIP. It was also my job to drain the bad water from the quarantine tanks, so I sat here on the beach waiting for the tanks to drain. The first tank was nearly drained when the pump stopped working for an unknown reason. Franklin will have a look at it tomorrow and I got to go home a little early.

Katie had some interviews to film this morning on the beach. While doing rounds, I went out on the pier to scoop the gunk that accumulates under the pier. I wonder if I ended up in the back of any of their shots...

This is the aquaponics system in place at Biosphere 2. It's one of the most popular attractions on the tour since people find it easy to understand and applicable to their lives. It is my job to maintain the system on days I work! The system is a staircase design with koi and placko fish in the top tank. The most interesting part of this aquaponics system is the dwarf lemon tree in the bottom growing bed. This is the only recorded instance of citrus trees being successfully grown in an aquaponics system! Franklin says it produced fruit after 3 years.

The rainforest pond has been drained! Our attempt to catch minnows using the trap was unsuccessful. They are really tiny guys so they could get in and out of the trap. I spent most of my day with Katie and Erika trying to catch the minnows using various methods. In the end things got very messy and a lot of the minnows died likely due to the stress of the process, but we did have some swimming around in our tank! These minnows have been in the rainforest since the begining of Biosphere 2. That's around 30 years and several generations of minnows! Since Katie deemed them worth saving, we have the survivors in our marine lab until they can be reintroduced in a couple of months. Afterwards, I caught crayfish in the savanna creek and switched out the one that is kept in the lab. This has been my most involved day so far!

Here is our first attempt to rescue the minnows. This hose is letting out the water from the pond in the rainforest. We were hoping to catch the fish as the water drained, but all we got was a leech! Towards the end there was too much mud to keep using the hose, but the pond wasn't completly drained so we went straight to the valve. As the mud rained down, we caught it in a trashcan and held the net to catch the fish. This is when we were finally catching some! Although many of them died.. but when we saw the first swimmer Katie shouted out because we saved some!

This is the viewing window of the rainforest pond. The water is all gone! This is because the rainforest is being put through a drought for a huge experiment. By tracking the carbon molecules that the plants intake and seeing where the plant stores them while under the stress of a drought. This will give us an extremely important understanding of what could happen in the future as climate change progresses. Climate change will cause droughts in rainforests and where the plants store their carbon affects how much oxygen they'll put out. More than 20% of the world's oxygen comes from the Amazon rainforest! Visit the link for more outstanding facts about the rainforest.

This was not such an interesting day. I did rounds as usual and cleaned up on the beach. The net over the tide tank had to be cleaned of salt water marks and the benches needed cleaned as well. I also sat for a while scraping some mysterious dark algae off the rocks beneath the tide tank. Overall just trying to make the viewing area more presentable.

This is the Algal Turf Scrubber (ATS) in the Mangrove. It was constructed by faculty and students from the University of Maryland (watch video using link). ATS are an ecologically engineered technology used to remove nutrient pollution from water. The mangrove water is pumped into the raceway and an algal community grows on the screens. The algae uptakes nutrients in order to grow, which cleans the water and harvesting the algae completely removes pollutants from the system.

Everyone kept me pretty busy today. As soon as I arrived Erika and Ty took me to learn how to fill the scuba tanks. From there Katie called me to the analytical lab to show me and Erika how to use the colorimeter to analyze nutrient levels in water samples from the ocean and mangrove. After lunch I joined Ty and Erika in the employee's cassita to label bottles for their upcoming data project.

I learned how to fill oxygen in the scuba tanks. I am not certified to scuba dive, but plenty of the staff is. Ty and Erika went for a dive Friday afternoon, so I had these prepared for them. Franklin says he wants to take me into the ocean. I don't need to scuba dive though, I can use a snorkle. I am not sure if I'd be interested in scuba diving. We will see.

For the next 6 days, Ty and Erika will be gathering data from the ocean at 10am and 10pm. I helped them by labeling these vials.

This is the tide tank on the beach. There are plenty of sea urchins in here. They are kept in this tank on the beach to be shown to visitors as a demonstration of some of the invertebrates living in the B2 ocean. It is my job to exchange the rocks in the tank for ones with algae on them for the urchins to eat!

Today wasn't so exciting for me but something cool happened yesterday! The B2O team (Franklin, Ty, Erika, and some helpers) dove into the ocean and manually removed over 1300 pounds of algae! My task today was to log the data into a spreadsheet and calculate the total weight, which turned out to be pretty impressive but there's still a lot more that needs to go!

I spent most of the day helping out in the lab. I organzied and numbered samples and transferred them into different vials. Ty asked me to help him create an automated water sampler system so they don't have to dive for samples all the time. We got started on the design for that project and I am working on the budget now! This showed me some of the skills I have that are different from and useful to the rest of the team. They want new innovations, but don't necessarily know what the best designs for these systems are or how to program their microcontrollers, which is something I have some knowledge in.

The Biosphere has an ocean gallery where you can get a view of the ocean underwater. You can see Erika here diving to collect samples. This is also the area where the team pulled 1300 pounds of algae earlier this week, and you can see the difference!

This is our analytical lab. I spent most of my day in here analyzing ocean and mangrove samples with the colorimeter. Erika has to go back to Brazil for a while, so I was on my own in the lab today. I am enjoying getting to use my chemistry skills although I only had to take 2 semesters of chem and everyone else on the team is trained far beyond that. However, I did have to take a lab safety lesson and learn to work with hazardous chemicals for this lab! I really like the science that is involved here.

It's true. The sea will outlive us all. Haha! These are called secchi disks, which are used to measure the turbidity of the ocean. In this video you can see how cloudy the water looks and the visibility is only 2 meters. The team is suspicious of the murky ocean and believe the algae pull from earlier this month could have stirred the sediment and released algae spores to cause a bloom. I will be involved with finding the solution to this problem in the future. This is why the work I do in the lab is important!

Today I teamed up with Jake to complete lab work and calibrate the YSI sensor. Jake is an REU student, which means he is an undergrad from Cincinnati that is doing research with the B2O team for the summer. The colorimeter water sampling went much faster with both of us. Afterwards Katie took us to the pier to calibrate the YSI sensor.

The YSI sensor, which I recently helped to calibrate, is an oceanography water quality monitoring system that is often used out at sea. It is also called a CDT (conductivity, temperature, depth) probe or a Sonde. The photo shows an array of probes which are positioned at differing depths to obtain data. As you can see on the screen, the sensor reads temperature, conductivity, salinity, pH, oxidation-reduction potential, chlorophyll concentration and dissolved oxygen data.

This here is Frank, the marine lab turtle. Today I had to feed him and clean his rocks and change his filter.

The coral raceway is being assembled! This is where the team will grow the corals that will be introduced to the ocean for the coral reef project! I have been doing some brainstorming on how I can contribute my engineering skills and apply what I have learned in class to our projects here. After doing some looking around on the internet I found an opensource coral reef tank monitoring system for Raspberry Pi. We already have some Pi's here that aren't being used so the team has lended them to me to start building this monitoring system!

Here is the Algal Turf Scrubber in the Mangrove after about a month of operation. You can see the algae has really grown! This system has become one of my favorites in the Biosphere because it has such practical potential to be used in lakes (or even the ocean) that are experiencing eutrophication and dead zones from excessive algae growth.

I got another idea of applying my knowledge to our work here at the biosphere. This past semester I took a course on Biosystems Analysis in which we learned how to use python to develop models for biological systems. In that class I had developed an algae growth model. I thought it would be cool to adapt that model for the B2 Ocean using our colorimeter data. This is the colorimeter data in an excel sheet that my program references to run its analysis. I would need to collect more data (such as the light intensity at certain depths) to complete an accurate prediction model, but this could become something cool eventually! Nevertheless, it was a great exercise in engineering thinking.

My biggest takeaway from this internship is that you can make way for your aspirations. I am not a scientist. I am an engineer but I do not think I am one that has an existing discipline yet. I sort of use Biosystems Engineering as an oppurtunity to create a niche where I can do the kind of work I want. That is using controlled environment systems to do research that will save the planet by simulation climate change conditions and developing the best protocols for remediative solutions. I do not believe I would have gotten anywhere close to that as I have at Biosphere 2. If you don't feel like you belong in any existing category of career options, you can make you own. I also took the oppurtunity at Biosphere 2 to submit my own proposal for a Senior Engineering Design project sponsored by Biosphere 2 and funded by the Biosystems Engineering department. We will be creating environmental monitoring systems for the coral reef raceway and lunar greenhouse at the Biosphere. Because of this internships I set myself up to have a promising senior year of undergraduate and many more possibilities for my masters degree and beyond. I would absolutley recommend this internship experience to other BE students.