A City Lost In Time

Jerusalem has been on my top 10 of cities to visit for a long time. Not to go pray at some holy relic. I’m not religious, have never been and doubt I ever will be. Not to visit museums. I’ve never really had the patients for that. Not to go shopping. There are so many other places to do that. 

I wanted to visit Jerusalem to be in the center of history. To feel and experience the area that claims to be the birthplace of religions that ultimately shaped the modern society. To see the ancient ruins and marvel at churches and mosques built with a finesse and technic that makes me wonder if they perhaps used magic to make it all stand straight. To try to grasp, maybe just a hint, of why people still strive to this place with their beliefs and why people are still arguing over what is most holy, to whom and who has the most rights to the holiness.

I am not sure I succeeded in much more than marvel at the ruins, churches and mosques.

Old City surrounded by newer city

Old City

Before walking into the Old Town, I remembered something my mum told me from her visit to Jerusalem many years ago.

“The smell. The smell of the city is just it’s entire own. Nothing compares.” 

The first paces around town seemed pretty trivial to me. I could smell gasoline, car exhaust, dog poop, pee, someone cooking something. Not really anything special. But as we walked further and further in to the Old City the smell changed. Now, a dry smell of old dusty rocks dominated. The endless shops with scarfs, jewelry and souvenirs sent out vibrant smells of incense. Shops with dry goods oozed of exotic spices, fruit stands smelled of ripe bananas and mangos, a turning sharwama dripping with grease. On top of that the people, the atmosphere, the noises, all combined created a special smell, a feeling, of being in a living, breathing organism called Jerusalem.

Market in Old City

Stand of Spices

 

Walking around as a non-religious Scandinavian posed a lot of clothes changing. My cold Viking blood overheats at 25 deg C, so walking around in +30 deg C is not possible if not in shorts and sleeveless top. My instinct tells me to get as much sun and vitamin D as possible so covering up is not second nature. However, going in churches, to the Wailing Wall and other holy places requires you to cover as a minimum knees and shoulders. My solution was a knee long flowy skirt that does a wonderful “Marilyn Monroe” imitation at every gust of wind and a Jordanian scarf tossed casually over the shoulders. So ready for the holy places!

Being so close to so many so religious people was very bizarre for me. To have people mumbling to themselves, rocking back and forth, crying over tombs of long lost Saints, put belongings on graves and in vaults to have them get blessed, falling to the knees before and alter, stop the business for 10 min while praying on a carpet, sticking secret notes to God in cracks. To me, so odd and bizarre behavior. To believe in stories and histories so old, and in places built centuries ago for who knows what purpose. To have so blind faith in old scripts, old ways and the one and only God dictating everything is just so far away from my own reality. In some weird way, it’s almost beautiful. But mostly I find it very, very stupid. But maybe I am not that different. My truth and my belief just lie in facts and science. In what I can see, touch, smell and feel. My holy scripts are the papers of scientific discoveries, my Saints are the animals, plants and humans in this world, and my church is the wilderness of nature and the depth of the sea. How you practice your truth and beliefs in this world is what it in the end comes down to.

Monastery

Church of the Holy Sepulchre

I could have spent more time exploring the crooked and cracked streets of Old City and visiting more holy places and admired the ability of ancient architects. This first little peak into history has for now satisfied me with the knowledge that Jerusalem is something else. In this hot and arid part of the world it exists in its own little isolated bobble in time and space.

Al-Aqsa Mosque

The Western Wall - Divided in a women and men section

Go dive (or die trying)

Diving in Eilat is a very pleasant experience.

Coming from the freezing and murky-green water of Monterey Bay, the crystal clear blue water in the Gulf of Aqaba feels almost sinful. Swimming around in a 5 mm shorty wetsuit is only for show since the water is 27-28 degC (~80 Fahrenheit). So far there has been no currents or surge so you practically float around effortlessly. Completely weightless and at peace.

 

Puffer fish hiding among the corals

Polychaeata

Blue spotted sting ray

Soft coral

Surrounded by the endless deep blue are thousands of bright colors. Everywhere, shooting up and down, behind you, to the left, to the right. All 360 degrees are full of vivid colors of green, yellow, orange, pink, red, turquoise, another yellow, blue, purple. And in all shapes and patterns; spots, stripes, dots, streaks.

Clown fish

Blue Christmas trees - or Polychaetas

The soft corals sways gently back and forth while fish swims in and out between the branches of their solid cousins. Looking for shelter, looking for food. In between the branches of the corals colorful little Christmas trees appear; red, blue, yellow, purple. Hard to believe that there is a worm on the other end.

In the sand snails, hermit crabs and rock fish slowly wander around. Camouflaged to perfection. Except the Nudibranches. Naked snails. For their own protection they shine in vivid colors. "Don't eat me. Don't come too close. I might be poisonous. Do you dare try?"

Chromodoris quadricolor - or a Pyjama Nudibranch

Parrot fish

The Ocean is a magical place. Things don't look anything as they do above. Above the surface desert dominates. Grey, yellow, orange, dusty. Under the surface colors and life; Blue, green, red, yellow, pink, orange, purple. The creatures are strange. Adapted to a different world.

It is a peaceful, meditative world. If you haven't yet - you should go dive.

 

Crinoid moving along 

Lion fish

Black-tipped grouper

The best lunch breaks ever

Time is moving along.
The last week and a half I've been nurturing my corals, keeping them happy. Sampling is not until this coming Thursday so I have a little "time off".

And what to do with your breaks here at IUI? Well, the Ocean is right there.. With coral reefs. You sun-screen up, put on your fins and mask and spend the next hour playing The Little Mermaid.

Yesterday I went out and found a coral full of Polychaete. They are filter-feeding worms and some of them are really beautiful!

Their body extends into a tube that is hidden among the branches of the coral. At the tube opening, they display their impressive filter fans. The worms can be long, but the fans are between 2-5 cm. And they are very skittish. If you get too close, they will retract their fans into their dwelling tube before you even perceive it. They you'll have to wait a min or two before they slowly unfolds them again.

It spent almost 30 min at this particular coral, just to try to get some decent photos. Free-diving down, without any weights on and try to stay still enough for my camera to focus on these tiny things, was quite the task!

But they are one of my favorite organisms in the Ocean. They are ancient, simple and incredible beautiful. And free-diving is a good core-workout so there is really nothing to loose by spending a good amount of time photoshooting them. Expect perhaps time to eat your lunch..


It makes you gape like this Picasso Triggerfish

The coral cliff hanger..

Working with biology is always funny. You can't really predict anything and as soon as things start to look good, life chooses another way and will mess everything up. It's the curse of biological experiments but also what makes it really fascinating and interesting to work with!

Something like that happened to my corals right after we added the different water treatments to the aquariums. After 24 hours in treated water, the coral fragments of species Acropora decided that life wasn't worth living anymore. Specially in one of the aquariums, they seemed to have planned a coordinated suicide demonstration. All of them were bleaching!

Bleaching event

A quick basic recap for those of you who might be unfamiliar with coral bleaching: Corals have a symbiotic relationship with a tiny little phytoplankton (Dinoflagellates) most commonly called zooxhantelleas. The zoox live in the coral tissue where they can photosynthesis giving the coral energy. In return the coral provides a safe refuge and essential nutrients. A nice win-win for both. However, if the coral is stressed it can expel the zoox - it will bleach! This can be fatal for the coral, but it is also possible for them to recruit new zoox and recover. 

 If this bleaching really was a result of our water treatment, that would be a very interesting and quick response! However, it seemed that only one aquarium was heavily affected.
To try to save the poor little things we moved them back to a control tank. Then added three new fragments in the affected aquariums and left them overnight to see if the same response would happen. We added more shade to the aquariums since the Acropora sp. can be very sensitive to light - maybe the combination of treated water and light was the problem?

Healthy Acropora.

Bleached Acropora

The next day the new test fragments looked fine. Our conclusion: the light intensity had been too high. I then spent the day chipping off new fragments to replace the bleached ones and got all the coral fragments back into the aquariums with the treated water.

They have now been there for a few days and the look to be surviving.
Experiment back on track !

Doing science : Cleaning aquariums !

It's almost been a week now in Eilat, and boy has it been busy!!

Dealing with jetlag and acclimating to the 40 *C desert was done by working 10-12 hours every day and half of that outside in the heat! For this poor Scandinavian that meant a whole lot of sweating!
But - much was accomplished this first week !

A few weeks back corals were collected for my experiment and was chipped in to fragments and put in tanks. All ready to be played with! However, no one had kept and eye on them since, so I arrived to every aquarium-enthusiast's worst nightmare:

 

Lovely coral-poop and algae infested tank

So the first day Noam and I spent on cleaning the tanks so the poor little corals could breathe again.
So to all of you who might think Science is this mystic and high-tech field - nah-a! Our tools for cleaning the tanks: credit cards, sponges and plastic tubes for sucking out water.

With 9 tanks to clean it took us several hours before they were shining again. But It was evident that the little poopers were happy again!

Before and after..

Happy little poopers

Now that the worst of the cleaning is done, only a daily short "vacuum" is needed to collect the coral poop. For yes, even Queens poop and therefor also corals! To minimize the algae growth their poop has to be sucked up everyday.

Coral poop

With all this aside I could start getting the experiment set up. Which means, setting up water pumps, creating brine, organizing sampling times, equipment etc. With help from Edo and Eyal, everything got prepped and done this Wednesday and Thursday at noon the experiment was official up and running! So now there are three tanks flowing with normal seawater, three flowing the higher salinity seawater and three with high salinity and specific chemicals.

Edo and Eyal setting up the water flow

Adina inspecting the 1000L water tank - always ready for a photo-op!

Our first samples were collected in the afternoon which meant a long night sampling. Sampling is both a fun and sad thing to do: The corals sampled will have to die, which I guess might disturb some people, but on the other side that means less corals to poop in the tank and less to clean up! The sampling involves removing the coral tissue from the skeleton (sounds much more dramatic than it is) by an airpump. And then purify the tissue into different sample vials that will later be analyzed.
With all the different corals and treatments I'm collecting 27 corals each sampling time. The sampling process is then a 6-7 hour long process with 5 people working non-stop. Luckily, I only have 3 sampling times.

Coral grave yard

Living Acropora sp.

This very morning, coming in to clean the tanks a lot of stuff had happened over night! The tanks with salt and chemicals had shown a major response to the treatment! Most of the corals were dead or dying! But that is a whole other story and I will leave that as a cliff hanger..
Stay tuned to learn about the fate of the little poopers !

Project Synopsis: The Ecological Effects of Desalination Brine

I wonder, how many of you reading this had ever considered drinking seawater? When I was a kid playing at the beach in summer times, my parents always told me not to drink the seawater; It would make me sick. In many parts of the world, ex. Denmark where I grew up, drinking water comes from the ground as groundwater, from rain, lakes, rives, aquifers or other terrestrial sources - not from the salty Ocean.
However, in other parts of the world, groundwater is extremely scarce and rain almost non-existing. How does people get drinking water in these regions? Well, one way is actually to drink the Ocean. Of cause not literally taking a glass down to the beach and pour in some water - but take the seawater and treat it; remove the salt; desalinate it.
The Ocean covers more than 70% of our globe and consists of almost 90% of all accessible water. Using this massive water resource for drinking water seems almost too logical.


Desalination of seawater is a widely used source of potable water in arid and semi-arid regions, like the Arabian Peninsula, Israel, parts of the Mediterranean region and now in drought-stricken California too.

The process of desalination can be described very simplified: Seawater is pumped into a desalination plants where, by various methods, the salt is removed and the water cleaned to make fresh drinking water. Many desalination plants are using reverse-osmosis to remove the salt from the water. In this method, pressure is applied to push the water through a semi-permeable membrane creating two products: fresh water and a high-salinity brine. The brine, along with various chemicals used for treatment and cleaning at the plant, is then discharge back into the ocean, very often in close proximity to shorelines and beaches.

Schematic diagram of the SWRO process

Despite the growing popularity of seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) plants and the overall global interest in seawater desalination, very little is know about the consequences of discharging brine into coastal communities.

The addition of very saline water in a confined coastal area could cause changes in the biochemistry and biology potentially leading to changes in the trophic levels, coastal pollution or recreational disruption.


I study the effects of such brine in coastal areas. My main focus is the ecological effects on ocean organisms and I hope to be able to identify what happens in the coastal zone when discharging brine, which constituents in the brine is effecting organisms and the boundary limits and thereby help to increase the sustainability of seawater desalination.

During my time in Israel I will conduct two biological experiments, that hopefully will enlighten how different organisms will respond to brine discharge.

Phytoplankton growth

Firstly, I will look at how phytoplankton will respond in their growth, primary production and the structure of the community, eg. what species of phytoplankton is growing.
Phytoplankton make up the very bottom of the food chain, and changes in their growth and community could cause changes up through the higher trophic levels. Certain conditions can also favor certain phytoplankton species causing periodical blooms of plankton that can, depending on the species, be harmful for both fish, marine mammals and anthropogenic activities.
To test the effects of brine on phytoplankton, I will have to grow them under conditions I control and in a confined space I can access.
The method of choice is to add different treatments to bottles of seawater. The seawater will be collected directly from the ocean surface and will contain a random selection of the local phytoplankton community. The bottles containing seawater will then be treated different ways:

The first bottle will serve as control and have nothing added to the seawater. This bottle is the reference point. The second bottle will have added 1% brine, which will represent the lower margin of what can be assumed to be mixed in the coastal water. The third bottle will have 10% brine, which is representing a maximum concentration of brine. And a fourth bottle will contain some of the known chemicals and metals discharged along with the brine.
Over a period of 5 days the bottled and treated seawater will be monitored and by the end it will be possible to map out how the phytoplankton grew in the four different conditions.

Four bottles containing seawater and each a different treatment.

Coral health and growth

Secondly: I will be looking at coral health and growth in brine.
Corals are, to many, pristine ocean creatures and some of the most diverse and lively reefs are located in the Red Sea - many in close proximity to desalination discharge.
Coral reefs are crucial habitats, shelters and feeding grounds for enormous amounts of fish and seacreatues and are recreational havens for scuba divers and snorklers providing and important economic factor for the countries with coastal coral reefs.
The health and well-being of coral reefs are therefore important in many aspects.
In a similar manner as with the plankton, I will grow corals under specific conditions and monitor them. To do this, small fragments of corals has to be collected from the ocean. The fragments are collected from specific coral nurseries, that are artificial reefs in the ocean, where corals are grown with the specific purpose of using them in science experiments. This enables scientists to do research on corals without disturbing actual reefs.

For the corals a control and a 10% brine treatment will be monitored. Because of the much slower growth, this experiment will be running for a minimum of 4 weeks. Each week a coral fragment will be collected and it will be analyzed for its growth and for the growth of the symbiotic algae living within it.

Schematic of an aquarium with coral fragments growing in it

I am excited to get started on these experiments and see what will happen when, under controlled conditions, local species are introduced to a higher salinity.

Stay tuned the next two months for updates and pictures of the bottle incubations and aquariums full of corals!

A New Chapter Begins...

The 2016 class of Coastal IRES is currently deep in work planning for our upcoming expedition to Eilat! There are three student participants this year, including oceanographers Michele Markowitz and Karen Petersen and paleontologist Dan Killam. We have diverse fields of study but are united by an interest in dynamics influencing the environment of the Israeli coast. Michele is investigating the influence of dust deposition on the efficiency of the biological pump, a mechanism which is an important control on deep ocean storage for the global carbon cycle. Karen is monitoring how brine discharge sourced from Israeli desalination plants affects the local phytoplankton and coral ecology of the region. Dan is researching how the giant clams vary in growth rate and metabolic health between ancient and modern times, and whether pollution depresses their growth rates.

Each project is described in more detail on the "Research Participants" page, and we will each be contributing a post outlining what we intend to achieve during our fieldwork this summer. We will also be narrating our experiences with day-to-day data collection, analysis and our general experience in the country of Israel. Our journey begins July 1st. Stay tuned!