Cages and friends

Over the past few days, we have been working hard to get everything ready for our big trip up to Isla Baltra, where we'll be working on multiple big experiments. I am going to be setting up my Pentaceraster cages this week, so I've been pulling together all the necessary materials and tools, and compacting them for transport.

Rolled-up cage sides and a stack of cage tops in the corner.

Someone has been busy in the week since I last worked on the caging material.

Rebar as cage anchors. I bought 6m of it at the construction store for $3.50 and asked them to cut it into 30cm pieces. They must have been very confused - I don't think they have ever cut rebar this small.

At the same time, we'll be setting up concrete bases for a large-scale sea urchin predation experiment that the lab will be running for the next couple of years. The bases will be put in the water this trip to accumulate a mat of turf algae for the urchins to graze on when the experiment actually gets going next summer. We moved them from the hardware/construction store to the loading dock yesterday. I'm excited to start putting them down using lift bags.

Jon on the station dock with his concrete bases.

The marine iguanas really liked them too.

We leave for Baltra tomorrow morning, so we loaded all our equipment into the boat today - there is a lot of it. We piled up all our stuff into a water taxi and it took two trips to get all of it on board our boat, the Pirata (probably the most adorable boat I have ever seen, complete with little pirate flag).

A very full water taxi at the loading dock. You can see: about half my cages, concrete bases, green oxygen box, GoPro camera stands, plenty of rope, quadrat, containers for Hexaplex snails. All our dive gear is in there as well, under the cages and rope.

Loading the concrete bases onto the boat. We were getting stared at by everyone in the passing boats and water taxis.

Will be hard at work for the next few days. There will eventually be photos.