After hours and hours of planning we have finally started our experiments in the wet lab. Kaitlyn and I rounded up what seemed like hundreds of West Indian Sea Eggs and Variegated Urchins, which we actually now need more of, in order to conduct trails on interspecific and intraspecific competition of the two species. During collection from the Bay, the urchins were shaken up a bit which sent them into spawning mode releasing orange colored eggs into our holding tank. Just for fun we decided to make a slide of the eggs to look at under our make-shift microscope, made from the cameras on our phones, and see how the eggs looked. Surprisingly the eggs could be seen pretty clear and were interesting to look at. We have about another 24 hours to go in our first test trials and to see if our data is working. Hopefully the urchins will continue to cooperate!

A few of our tanks set up to begin trials.

Trial of Variegated urchin consumption on Turf algae.

Orange eggs that were released from an urchin we had collected.

A view of the urchin eggs under our make-shift, smartphone camera microscope.  

-Breeanne