When thinking about underwater communities that attach to docks, signs, bridges, boats and such, I would picture oyster beds or barnacles covering the bottom of boats. However when I went down to the marina where I am conducting my research, I was blown away at the biodiversity living just below the surface, never noticed by most of those that walk above.
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| Floating docks with two different current velocities. |
Just from walking from one side of the marina to the other, I could visually see that where there was massive clumps of life on the dock on the main river, on the dock closest to shore there wasn't nearly as much. This led me to question, How does the presence of current affect the successful recruitment of a fouling community?
First, what is a fouling community? Fouling communities are are communities of organisms found on artificial such as boats, docks, marinas, seawalls.
There are a wide variety of organisms that inhabit and create these communities such as, sessile organisms and predators, Brittlestars, crabs, shrimp, macro and red algae, stony corals which have a hard skeleton and octocorals which lack a hard skeleton, sea anemone, bivalves such as clams, mussels, oysters, or tunicates, sponges, sea urchins, feather dusters, sessile worms, bryozoans known as moss animals which are filter feeding invertebrates, hydrozoa which are tiny predators that have a stage in life known as hydroids where they attached to substrate.
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| PVC tiles. |
I will use Inlet Harbor marina in Port Orange to place 2 10cm PVC squares on two separate floating docks to determine how current velocity affects recruitment of marine biological organisms. 2 squares will be placed on the side of a dock that experiences a high current velocity while the other two will be placed on a dock that sits in very little current. These PVC squares will then be analyzed to determine which location has a higher coverage of marine organisms. Photos will be analyzed using image software and Shannon-Wiener diversity index.
Janice P. Sec. 50. So thinking this through, where are you expecting more invertebrates to attach and why? I would think that being in the current would bring more organisms but the high currents would make it harder to attach? What do you think will happen? Thanks for your answer. Are you going to post any pictures?
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