Wow, have we been busy. The minutes have been flowing into hours then into days. Before we knew it, the blog hadn’t been updated in an excessively long time. Apologies! Every spare moment we’ve been trying to catch up on sleep or fight the constant struggle to keep our larvae alive. And boy do we have lots of larvae to maintain.
The small brown dots you see circling around in those oversized kriesels are all fertilized larvae being cared for by the SECORE team. They estimate a total of about 997,000 individuals, which I feel confident in rounding up to one million. One million larvae! And they’re looking really healthy. A good proportion of them will be settled onto ceramic tiles and outplanted onto the Rincon reef, while others will be shipped to various zoos and aquaria, where they will be reared in captivity.
We also have plenty left over for our own experiments. Unfortunately our attempts at Bajo Gullardo were fruitless (except for some awesome underwater videography; check out Iliana’s video below). For some reason, there was absolutely no fertilization from those crosses. The eggs looked an off-color shade, and they were slightly smaller than usual–the coral might have spawned prematurely. This is odd, considering just how healthy the reef is. Look at that coral cover!
Though the failure at BG was disappointing, our crosses from Tres Palmas did incredibly well both that night and the following. In the next post, I’ll walk you through the entire process of spawning preparations, collection, and larval rearing. In the meantime, enjoy these shots of tonight’s sunset taken by our very own Barret Christie. I swear to you, we get real work done when we’re not lazing on the beach!