quantitative in situ plankton imaging and
energetics
home @ BLAKE HALL @ COOK COLLEGE
Project: Filter-feeding
school of juvenile Clupea
harengus in the BALTIC @ Flensburg Fjord on August 15 2000 15.58
in a micropach of plankton. Over 3 gigabyte
of high resolution media with a resolution, that you can see the gills
of the juveniles and the ecact location and dynamics of the
opercular components and mouthparts - they will be evaluated for
swimming speed of the individuals, distance to neighbors, width and
hight of the mouthopening in relation to bodylength, spreading of the
operculum, distance travelled before clearing, time needed for
clearing, angle in the water, speed and course changes in relation to
the copepod-patch harvested. They will inflow in a biomathematical model
of Clupea filter feeding under extreme prey conditions, also define
the orientation strategy of schools: Synchrokinesis (see Tony Pitcher
"Teleost Behavior", our standard textbook, some mirrored @
http://www.ecoscope.com/pitcher.htm).
Development and testwork performed @ the RUMFstation, construction and storage
in Blake. For the work of evaluating the high resolution material we need
an SGI workstation with some imaging related additions and subsystems,
all in high resolution. It will carry an adjusted version of the dynIMAGE
program developed with VOLKSWAGEN funding (ca. 250 000 US-dollar). New systems
used in this venture are micro-engineered and tested off the Lifesaving
Station for future missions below the ice of Antarctica. With the
herring-ecomodel deriving from these evaluations it will be possible at
a much higher definition level as currently available to budget energy-flow,
carbon-dynamics and biodiversity parameters within the umbrella of the
GLOBEC recommendations framework. This work follows the "New-Technology"
recommendations we set up @ the GLOBEC meeting in Paris and the workshops
in Norway and Georgia.
single frame of the 50 frames per second optics
- some school members swim with wide opened mouth side by side at the same
speed for some distance - the synchronisation of this filterfeeding is currently
evaluated on a supercomputer under aspects of synchroPredation and
synchroKinesis - click
on the image
to animate
(under processing)
herring school at a distance in Kiel Fjord (Baltic)
(MPEG1
0.7 Mb)
gravid males and females over a spawning bed already
full of egs (white)
(MPEG1 0.5
Mb)
herring school turnig at one of our transient bubble
curtains (MPEG1
0.7 Mb)
Budgets used:
Project outline and first calibration imaging: 350
000 DM from BMFT
Instrumentation development: 500 000 DM from VOLKSWAGEN
FOUNDATION
Testing and adjusting instruments: 60 000 DM from
philanthropists
Transportation to the USA, tickets, small computers,
connectivity: 220 000 US dollar from RUTGERS startup fund and
instrumentation development fund
moderated
by Uwe Kils
Copyright Karin & Bjoern & Uwe
Kils
RUTGERS