I promise I work... sometimes.

I was walking through the office today, and as I walked by the front door a gust of wind blew in heavy with the smell of the ocean. I love that smell. Salty with a hint of seaweed ("hint" may be an understatement). I still haven't gotten used to the fact that I work right on the water. I feel so lucky to get to work in Sea Point everyday. My hour commute is well worth being able to go jogging along the beach during lunch break.

They say it gets windy here sometimes.

The building I work in on the right. the path that I run on to the left.

View from the front door.

View of the front door with Lion's Head in the background.

Besides the amazing location I am so happy to be working at the Marine and Coastal Management aquarium because the people and their research are both incredible. It is purely a research aquarium, which means it's not open to the public and no, there aren't any sharks here. Most of the research here is related to aquaculture. With the rapidly increasing population and demands for food increasing with it, wild-caught fish are continually being over exploited. In the search for new methods of food production the world is now looking at expanding aquaculture. It's amazing to be right in the middle of brand new research, the results of which could have beneficial impacts across the world. Most of the work done here is concerned with fin fish and mollusk culture and disease prevention.

Abalone culture. They let me hold one the other day. He was squirmy. 

Beautiful spiral staircase in the middle of the building.

Underwater view of my favorite tank. It holds some miscellaneous creatures, such as sea urchins, star fish, and other species that aren't being used for experiments right now.  

I'm helping design and carry out a project investigating the effect of probiotics on land based culture of the dusky kob. Dusky kob (Argyrosomus japonicus) is a finfish currently being overexploited in the wild, but so far there has been little research concerned with aquaculture of the species. A huge problem with aquaculture is disease propagation and spread resulting from high species density in small quarters. Therefore a lot of research right now is focused on how to counteract harmful parasites and bacteria, while being as environmentally friendly and cheap as possible. We are going to try to increase the parasite resistance of the dusky kob through feed enriched with yeast. Yeast is a natural probiotic that has been found to enhance immunological response in some species of fish (not dusky kob... yet). Right now we are working out all the details, but basically we will culture a strain of yeast (Debaryomyces hansenii), make a pellet feed enriched with this yeast, feed it to dusky kob in tanks, and take blood samples to measure their immunological response. Eventually we will introduce the parasite (Diplectanum oliveri) to the fish and measure infection level and mortality. The parameters we are looking at include hemoglobin, haematocrit, immunoglobulin, and glucose levels. We are also looking into developing a vaccine. If we can isolate the right antigen and inject it into the dusky kob the fish could develop a resistance to the parasite. 

I am so happy that they are letting me work on this probiotic research. In a single project we are going to work with yeast, fish, and parasites. I am so excited to have the opportunity to work on a project where I will get to experience so many different aspects of marine research. Except for starting to culture the yeast, so far I've just been researching how we are going to carry out the entire project. We have to figure out everything from how we are going to quantitate parasite infection to what size pellets we should cut the feed into. We are going to start taking pre-treatment blood samples soon, so I've been working on creating a list of parameters to test. 

Another thing to be thankful for is that they gave me an office! Brett, my supervisor told me that he was going to find me a place to work, and I thought he meant a computer that I could use in a shared space. Turns out that there was a free office, so they put my name on the door and everything. I don't have a view of the ocean, but the office is pretty big and if you look out the window at the right angle you can just see the top of a palm tree. 

My very own office!

My name on the door and a note telling me that my computer doesn't work.. at all. 

Mark, a PhD student here, is doing some really cool research with sea urchin culture. In Japan sea urchin gonads, or "uni" are a popular sushi, but currently they are being overexploited in the wild. Uni can go for R4000 a kiogram and with a gap in the market opening up from decreasing availability of wild sea urchins, land based culture could be huge economically for South Africa. Mark has developed an artificial feed that increases the size of the gonads by 205%. Not only that, but he is growing sea urchins with better color and texture, and therefor a higher quality product. The really neat part is that the feed is made up partially of sea weed that can be grown in the same land based system as the sea urchin and consumes waste produced by the urchins, creating a multi-trophic aquaculture system. After reading about his work I really want to try uni because it is described as tasting like a rich orange oyster. Mark says that he saves the best looking urchins from his dissections to eat. I obviously need to become better friends with him and help him "dissect sea urchins."

Sea urchin culture.