Dirty Work

Today, Caroline is giving her official presentation on the Copper Pollution's effect on Corals project she worked on all summer. Of course, that meant she couldn't be here to monitor her corals, which needed to be placed in a water bath with a low concentration of copper for two hours. She asked me yesterday to do it for her while she was gone and it was no sweat off my nose. What she also mentioned, however, was that she had collected a lot of sand and put them in three different containers, and now she wasn't using two of them. Unfortunately, the two unused also did not have water circulating through them. When I was checking things out, I smelled something that was bothering me, and it wasn't the sickly sweet smell of Acropora yongei mucus. After some searching, I discovered that it was the smell of sand that had been sitting in still water for days, possibly weeks. It wasn't yet afternoon, which is when I needed to put the corals in their water baths, so I decided to take of the smell by removing the sand from the glass tank it was in and into a big orange Home Depot bucket. The mucky sand and smell assaulted my senses, but after some hard and dirty work, the unpleasant odor issue was solved and the tank cleaned. It was quite a yucky experience. However, ladies and gentlemen, that is hands-on science for you. Scientists have to do the set-up and the clean-up (in this case, I just did the clean-up; alas, c'est la vie). But researchers aren't just handed a study on a silver platter (if only) and this is some evidence of that.