Day 5: Mesocosm Day

Mesocosm field (45 tanks)

Ready to search

 This is going to be a shorter post because well, it has been a long day and I'm ready to hit the hay. Today was Mesocosm day, which means instead of going out and sampling ponds, we stayed on site at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre (CNSC) and collected data from the mesocosms. What are mesocosms you ask? They are simply a fancy name for a medium sized tank environment. Lee-Ann's experiment had 45 of these tanks with very controlled conditions and 9 different experimental set-ups. Some tanks had no nutrients, some had a medium amount added, some had a lot added.



Some tanks were left at natural temperature, some heated a medium amount, some heated a lot, and some tanks had a combination of two of the factors. They call this type of experiment a 3x3 factorial since there are types of nutrient and 3 types of temperatures and there end up being 9 combinations of those factors. On top of those set-ups (each one having 5 tanks), a certain amount of tadpoles were added.

1 of the tanks had no tadpoles for each set-up, 2 of the tanks had only wood frog tadpoles, and 2 of the tanks had wood frog and chorus frog tadpoles. The goal was to see how these different factors affect the growth rate and time of metamorphosis for the tadpoles.

Claire my co-seeker

All the different teams had different jobs, some measured water quality (pH, conductivity, etc.) and some measured the amount of phytoplankon in each tank. I was on the growth rate team and had two jobs...1. To capture tadpoles from the tanks using a net to be weighed and 2. weighing the tadpoles.

Boreal Chorus frogs who have started
metamorphasis

5 frogs per container

The first half of the day, I was on a seek and collect team. I really liked this job. Although it was difficult at times to find the tadpoles in the tanks, some were cloudier than others because of the nutrient levels, It was always satisfying when you were able to spot a little tadpole and scoop it up. It also kind of looked like we were bobbing for apples. Sometimes our heads would be so close to the water to be able to see through the water's reflection and or/algae. After we collected 5 tadpoles from a tank, we'd take a picture of them to have as a visual reference of their size and then move on to step two. We always took two pictures of each container just to ensure that everything was properly labeled and had a back-up.

collecting visual evidence
of frog size

Set-up for weighing the tadpoles

Can you see their eyes and mouths?

The second job was to weight the tadpoles. This was very tedious and involved a lot of scooping tadpoles out of a container putting them in a cup, weighing it, re-zeroing the scale, and then adding another tadpole to the cup just to start all over again. Of course we cleaned our tools between each container, couldn't have any cross contamination. I helped to weight 100 tadpoles. That gets a little repetitious after a bit.

Over 200 data points today,
that's a lot of tadpoles!

All of that work took me to dinner time which was amazing. Vegetable cabbage roles and APPLE CRISP for dinner, Whoo hoo! I was so exhausted after dinner I took a nap before our evening tour of the building. The CNSC is a LEED Gold Certified building for all you architect and design people who know what that means, for those who don't, it means it is built environmentally friendly. Lee-Ann took us on a tour to learn all about some of the heating and water efficiency practices that go in to make the building so environmentally friendly. After the tour, I grabbed a quick shower (which was good because the CNSC only uses 87 Liters of water per person per day which is drastically under the 320L on average an North American uses per day in water.

Alright, tomorrow is my Kayak tour of the river which holds Beluga Whales! Stay tuned for more info on that.