The Marine lab on Aitutaki is housing a multitude of giant clams, while doing research on the impacts of amino acids in their survival. With the addition of these acids to their diets, the clams were found to survive longer and thrive better in their environment. In the wild, these clams are unlikely to survive […]
Since we got the rest of our stuff today I was able to get trained to survey lagoon. To do this we need 2 transect tapes, a ruler, waterproof paper, something to right on and a pencil. First we take one transect tape and go 25 meters (m) into the lagoon. Then we take your […]
The Aerial and Aquatic Robot Research team (aarr.piratelab.org) now has a somewhat reliable internet connection and will now have more frequent updates. The team split up this morning, half of the team joined the other sandy beach ecology group, and the rest of our team went to the main village in Aitutaki to obtain a […]
The team now has a somewhat reliable internet connection and will now have more frequent updates. The team split up this morning, half of the team joined the other sandy beach ecology group, and the rest of our team went to the main village in Aitutaki to obtain better internet connections, and download the files that are necessary for mapping and beginning the remotely piloted systems surveys. After returning to our hotel, the team reassembled, and the cargo finally arrived from the airport!
![20150731_132519[1]](http://aarr.piratelab.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/20150731_1325191.jpg)
We opened our luggage and to our dismay, one of our ROVs had been smashed to pieces. This came as a shock as it was in a pelican case, and the other ROV was loosely packed in a crate with foam padding. The team rushed to assemble the shattered ROV, and affix the bio-fluorescence payload to the ROV, and compensate for the chance in balance / ballast. We also assembled all of our robots, and took a picture with the rest of the teams, to publish in the local newspapers, to inform the local villagers about the work that we are doing, and the the strange looking tools that we are using.
After repairing the broken ROV (Leviathan), and mounting up the payload (on R.U.M.), we headed out to the northern part of Aitutaki and launched our experimental setup on it’s first dive.
The dive was successful, and we detected the proteins in the coral that we were looking for! There are a number of things that we need to improve before the next dive, but that will come in the following days.
Tonight we launched the OpenROV equipped with the payload to detect fluorescence in the ocean. It consists of a blue LED strip (excitation source), a power source and a GoPro with a yellow filter (detection). It was launched from the North of Aitutaki in the Cook Islands where an abundance of life exists, including corals, […]
Today we all went to the island of Motukitiu on Aitutaki. This island was previously a pit stop for planes traveling the Pacific in 1950 to 1962. During this time planes could not travel far distances, so Tasmanian Empire Airways Limited (TEAL) built up this island for wealthy travelers to visit. This island has one […]
The group visited a marine lab on Aitutaki today and met with Charlie Waters. Charlie recently finished a PhD focused on the giant clams of the Cook Islands. These clams were heavily overfished until they became functionally extinct (could not reproduce in the wild). Clams are important filter feeders in the reef ecosystem and are […]
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