Hey folks Robert from Marine Depot here.
And I'm at the Concordia University in Marine Lab to take all of you on a very special tour and check out some really awesome
animals
Alright, so what are we looking at here Sean.
So this is is one of our sort of showcase tanks where we put some of our bigger species right now
We've got swimming around a swell shark, we got a got a horn shark
Both adults though not full size so they could be a little bit larger
And then these these fish over here are called rock wrasse another local species
And there's a giant kelp fish that's hanging out. Sort of underneath our camera here
This is our live stream camera that we have streaming out of our webpage some artificial
algae's and seagrass Fucas the the
Rock weed, you know California for a long time we had that big problem with Coulerpa on our coasts
I think there's like the Coulerpa Action California Coulerpa Action Team.
Is that still an issue? I haven't heard anything definitive to say it's not. I doubt that ever will be not a problem at all
Right because once this species of invades, it's almost impossible to get rid of it.
So so they are still I know in some of the surveying groups like Reef Check California
They're still on the list of species to look out for and you're gonna definitely wanna record those when you see em.
What do we got here? Dungeness it looks like. Yeah, it's a little, a little Rock Crab.
Noah, hes the Marine Lab manager.
He goes down with our collecting permit and sets out some crab nets every once in a while.
A then we have a variety of other invertebrates.
Down on this on this rack. These are oftentimes the
Animals that we take out to the mobile touch tanks for our outreach events at schools. So we've got you know our warty sea cucumbers
These are basically our cleanup crew
We have purple urchins, red urchins, giant keyhole limpets, wavy turban snails.
I know Concordia there's a lot of outreach with
Like local events and they bring the touch tanks to sort of bring awareness for conservation and you know Marine Biology to kids.
But I've always kind of wondered like how do these animals hold up to being touched and moved?
Like what you guys do do I get sort of prevent that and protect the animals?
Yeah
So a lot of that I comes from selection of what animals we take.
So we take all the invertebrates and we're taking invertebrates that tend to hold up pretty well. So
things like sea stars and urchins and snails.
Tend to do really well in those situations
Things are a little more sensitive are sea hairs and sea cucumbers
So we have to be a little bit more cautious with those
But for instance our our sea stars have been
Used for the last two and a half years with this the touch tank program and and they're still trucking along
Up top we've got a this is kind of just a holding tank. We've got some
Pismo clams so one of the other research projects we do here. Is a, its surveying the population of Pismo Clams in Orange County?
We're trying different tagging materials
putting metal tags onto the clams and ultimately once we work out the methodology plant them back out on the beach and
Be able to detect them where we go back with the metal detector
This is our, Life Support, yeah this is our life support. Its all custom built.
So what we do here we have a main pump, its a 1 horsepower pump that's sort of hidden in the back their.
it circulates our water through our
UV sterilizers. So we've got eight tubes in line
Um, I believe those are each 55 watt UV sterilizers.
And then from there it runs
Down into our chiller, a one horsepower chiller up through a check valve
to prevent backflow or siphoning from our tanks and then back up to the tanks
We run our system here about 16 or 17 degrees Celsius
Which is about sixty to sixty two to three degrees Fahrenheit. Everything is grounded to flow back down to the sump.
we've got bags activate carbon filter media.
We have a Ceramic, you know high surface area biological filtration media
We've got a real a real basic mechanical filter. Our main filtration is done by our gigantic
protein skimmer, so
This one doesn't fit the sump like most skimmers. This one was built by Rk2 systems in San Diego and this
Is running all the time on a subset of our water and actually dumps into a trickle filter also has bio balls in it
What this one right here?
So this is our water level indicator and it's the water levels you can see peeking out from behind.
For our home aquarists, why is it important to use unions and valves?
It's important because you will inevitably need to replace a part of your plumbing or you'll have a leak. You want to isolate it
and being able to
Take apart a piece of equipment and swap out a piece of equipment for another one without having to cut all your plumbing
and a redo it completely is really really good. So always use unions, always use unions.
I hope you enjoyed that first-hand look inside of a real working marine research lab for a fish fanatic like me these kind of experiences
Are certainly something special be sure to stick around because we have some great plans in store for the team over at Concordia University
Including a couple of tank builds as well as some field research trips. I want to send a special
thank you to Noah and Sean at Concordia University for all of their hard work as
well as I want to thank you guys for supporting our efforts in creating fun and entertaining videos just like this because without all of you
We couldn't do what we do here at marine depot.com
Until next time take care and happy reef keeping