This Autumn our seagrass researchers team from Radboud university Nijmegen and NIOO Yerseke visited our seagrass collegues in the Wadden Sea Station Sylt Germany. Besides the presentations we had some wonderfull excursions to the seagrass in the bay behind the institute. And our hosts Harald and Ragnild Asmus also to took us out to dinner to tast some of the local seafood. A wonderfull trip, enjoy the pictures!
Blog
-
Dutch Seagrass Excursion
Last year Laura was working together with me in Indonesia for her MSc. Now she already harvested a mega-seagrass-experiment for her own Phd. research. After receiving al lot of positive sms from Laura, when I was in Indonesia, I was looking forward visiting her experiment in Viane. Wouter also showed us his research on seagrass transplantation in Roelshoek. Eric Visser, Eelke Jongejans (both from RU’s Plant Ecology Department), Marieke and Leon were also invited to brainstorm over the driving forces behind succesful recolonisation after seagrass transplantation. The growth-season is very short from spring to early autumn but Zostera noltii growth rates are almost comparable, nevertheless seagrasses are still declining in the Netherlands. It is a pity that on the sites were seagrass grows most successful, dikes have to be enforced and seagrass have to give way.
-
Fieldwork with Wawan Derawan 2009
Derawan did not changed a lot since I left 10 months ago. This time Wawan and me came for only a few weeks to do 3 experiments on Derawan Island and to go to the other important Green turtle foraging grounds on Maratua (40km from Derawan) and Pulau Panjang (8 km from D). What did we do?
Terimah kasih Wawan for some of the pictures!
In short: At Derawan island the turtles were still grazing the seagrass by digging out complete (more…)
-
About infections and Stingrays
And now a horror story about infections and dangerous animals, which combination was still lacking on this blog. Halfway my experiments I got stung by a stingray when I walked to the experimental site (knee-deep water). I felt something very sharp and hard stinging 5 cm into my feet, 3 cm under my ankle, resulting in a lot of blood. I wore booties but it stung right through the neoprene and rubber. At first I kept thinking it was a sharp shell or glass and not a stingray because I did not notice any pain from poison at first and I expected to feel something moving if it was a stingray.
I had some visions about me unable to come back to the field so we continued and harvested the experiment for 2 hours. Already halfway I got some suspicion that I maybe was a stingray, I was in a lot of pain and an hour later I was experiencing the most pain ever. Looking at the 400m distance that I have to walk back to the shore made me feel hopeless. The pain was up to my knee. Off course I know that the stingrays are there and I always walk with sliding movements, which scarred them away 300 times before when I walked in the same area but I was just unlucky this time.
And know the worst part….. (more…)
-
Derawan Bersih
If you arrive on Derawan, especially with low tide, you will notice one thing immediately: GARBAGE. It’s everywhere! People living next to the shore throw everything in the water/on the beach; Garbage, toilet contents, everything. So one day when we were on our way to Maratua but when we had to return due to dangerous high waves (July and August is wave season / widow season) and we had the rest of the day off, we decided: let’s clean the area around our house!
Some kids were interested in what Wawan, Ibu Heldi, Ade (her son) and I were doing, and joined us. 5 hours later we gathered 3 m3 of garbage, consisting of 120 batteries (around 1 house only!!!), ±30 kg glass, ±10kg metal and a lot of plastic (even ½ fibre boat). The problem was where to leave this. Because they only have a place behind the football field were they gather and burn al the garbage. No waste sorting centre like you find in every Dutch city here, even not on the mainland cities! So the only thing what we could do (more…)
-
Fieldwork on Pulau Tikus near Jakarta
This time I will be here for 6 weeks only, visiting seagrass meadows of Pulau Tikus (Pulau Seribu, in front of Java) and Derawan (Kalimantan) again. I am working together with Wawan Kiswara (the Indonesian seagrass expert from Jakarta) who is very helpful and has a never-ending hospitality surge. Together with his daughter Nina we had our first long fieldwork day in Pulau Tikus. In Pulau Tikus we could find mono-species meadows of Halodule uninervis like we have in Derawan Island, but the big difference is that here they are still ungrazed.
After 3 weeks we went back. Arriving in Jakarta from Derawan we left already the next day for the last fieldwork on Pulau Pari and Pulau Tikus. My planning was very tight, maybe a little bit to tight because Wawan and I already also worked for weeks without weekends and making long working days (7-22) every day but there is so much to do,! Based on the field station of LIPI on Pulau Pari (=stingray island without stingrays) we could reach Pulau Tikus in 30 minutes. I added some more pictures of the end of experiment on Pulau Tikus. The gaps in the ungrazed seagrass recolonized the sandy gaps (created 20 days ago by us) very fast. So the experiment was a success, now we compare it with the seagrass regrowth in gaps of in the grazed area of Derawan.
-
Back in Indonesia, visa time again!
After a long silence I’m know blogging from Jakarta again! After 3 days, which consisted of taking a motor taxi (Ocek), and bus way back and forth between Immigration, Police, Ministry of Internal affaires and RISTEK, I have my KITAS! 1 day delay because the Indonesian had to vote for their new president (SBY; Yudhuyono, it is!) but besides that, things went very fluently this 2nd time! I knew were to go, who to ask (& who not), practised my new skills learned from Bahasa Indonesia lessons, and all went so well that I actually enjoyed Jakarta. Off course, the manual “Researchers visa and permits for dummies” by Lisa and me was also very helpful for myself and I fine-tuned the last details so that you can read the last visa guide version (3.0) here. What also helped was maybe because I entered Indonesia in a very relaxed mode after 4 days recharging at Rock Werchter (Prodigy!)>
-
NAEM Posterprize 2009
10 February Judith Sarneel and me found our way back (was it a Levy walk?) to Conference centre “De Werelt” for 2 days of total saturation by Ecological research during the Netherlands Annual Ecology Meeting in Lunteren: At daytime listen to “Allee effects”, early warning signals by spatial patterns, plantquality-herbivore interactions and at nighttime getting inspired from foodweb interations compared between seagrass, Serengeti-Mara, Hluhluwe (S.A.), and Barro Colorado (Panama) ecosystems.
The second day it was time for Madelon and me to present our poster “Overgrazing by Green Turtles?” (PDF) together with 45 others. The poster were evaluated on scientific quality, clarity and attractiveness. Not without succes, like you will see below we won the NERN and NECOV 2009 posterprize, and 300 euros! We are very happy with this result, now its time to write an article from it to apply for the PhD paper award next year ☺
The only critics on the poster: increase fontsize of the author names
-
Is it seagrass? oh it has eyes
If I’m with my nose between the seagrass I sometimes encounter camouflaged creatures which I would have missed if I wasn’t studying the seagrass. These encounters are most rewarding and will “make my day” If you have more examples of fauna mimicking seagrass, please send me your pics/movies. Click here to see some more seagrass associated fauna
The Robust ghostpipefish comes in several colours but the seagrass-green one is my favourite of course :).
Some more fauna in the seagrass bed, it hides between leaves, roots, in the sediment. Do you also want to see this? than join the project as an intern.
-
New Year : New URL
Like you must have noticed, I’ve moved the Blog of my Phd project to Penyu.nl! “Penyu” is off course ‘Sea Turtle’ in Bahasa Indonesia and I’m more flexible to do things with the weblog. Please change it in your Favourites or RSS subscriptions.
So what happened after my last blogs where I showed you pictures of my fieldwork in Kalimantan? For 3 months I was hiding behind high piles of samples in the laboratory of my University back in the Nijmegen, together with Laura. We analyzed soil and surface water for Ammonium, Phospate, Potassium, Sodium, Cloride, in the autoanalyser. And also we analysed Nitrate, which required a specific set-up with a Cadmium column as a reductor, which we first had to build ourselves. Furthermore we analysed Carbon:Nitrate ratios including stabile isotope ratio’s of dryed seagrass plants, to do this we had to shred the seperate plant parts into fine powder and fold 1500 samples into thin cups to balls of 1-1mm. We weighed biomass of all samples and made extracted elements from the dryed seagrass material by threating them with acid in the microwaveoven. Later we analyzed in the ICP spectometer what elements (including phosphate) were present in this extraction to check what the plants (-parts) took up from the water and soil. So combining this analysis we can now also compare C:N:P ratio’s. Many thank to Jelle Eygensteyn (Technician on the G.I.) for all the help with the analysis! Besides this, Madelon and I are also trying to calculate how many Green turtles the seagrass field could feed. First results look very promissing!
The last week of December I also followed a course in Basic Statistics (highly recommended) in Wageningen. So this year I can start with the analysis of all the data that I gathered in 2008 during my first fieldperiod. And now it is time to test the hypothesis, see if my experiments worked, and to make new plans for next fieldvisit coming August.
