skywatch

The sky as seen in the river a little while ago:



Happy Skywatch Friday!

Moving on

This little plant is traveling downstream just under the water surface until it gets caught on something and grows roots there:



Happy Watery Wednesday to all of you!

bloom

Some 14 days ago there was a heat wave (as in: a few days when the temperatures rose above 22 C) and so we had growth of luxurious proportions in our experimental flumes:



These filamentous algae are not the same as the smaller planctonic algae which cause the dreaded toxic algal blooms. They are just the chaps nobody wants to tread on when getting into a fresh water lake because they're dreadfully slimy. They are a food source and only take over if there are too many nutrients in the water - and too much sun :)

Visit 2SweetnSaxy for a good dose of Watery Wednesday.

water mirror

Tomorrow the first part of my fieldwork will finally end, and I'm celebrating with another work photo. I've taken pictures just below the water surface because I'm interested in floating biofilms. I love how the air-water boundary is a double sided mirror:



This is a little water-plant branch which got stuck on the chicken wire that covers my experiment (to protect it from dangerous moorhens). The water layer ends just above the branch...but I find it hard to see that half of the picture is a reflection.

Here's your link back to 2SweetnSaxy.

bad weather

Another week and then my current stretch of fieldwork will be over. I'm looking forward to it - I haven't had a proper weekend for a while, but many long days instead - and I'm feeling whacked. Last week was exceedingly cold, rainy and/or windy...not good when you have to handle sterile little sampling bags. There were several moments when I had to wade hastily (a contradiction in terms!) after my already bagged samples which, encouraged by the strong breeze, had started to float towards the sea. The sky often just offered cloud layer after cloud layer:




Click back to Skywatch Friday for hopefully lots of blue skies and warm sunlight.

world of biofilms

If you've left a comment in recent days and haven't yet got a return visit from me, the reason for it is that I've just got too much work...
That's also the reason why you'll get to see a peculiar photo today. It's a work photo:



What you see here is a busy underwater biofilm producing lots of bubbles in the process of digesting all sorts of stuff that has been washed or has fallen into the river.

Happy watery wednesday to you all.

Plastic

Plastic, I don't really like the stuff much, but what would we do without it -

It's ubiquitous in my work. I don't know how we would conduct the experiment we currently run if there was no plastic - e.g. here is my colleague in his plastic waders, cutting the plastic tubing that delivers the solutions to be dripped into the plastic flumes in the river. Each day I come with my plastic bottles to collect water samples from the flumes to investigate the microbes. The DNA which I extract is of course stored in plastic tubes.





TNchicks PhotoHunt has a great collection of different plastic photos.

watery -

I feel a bit washed out and watered down by all the rain and river in the last couple of weeks - hence this week's water photo is nothing but a reflection of my work place. I think it lacks enthusiasm...or maybe that's just how I feel:



Generally, it's really quite pretty there:


Back to Watery Wednesdays, hosted by 2SweetnSaxy, for lovely water photos from all parts of the world.

foul weather

The weather has been terrible...and I've had plenty numb toes the last couple of days from standing around in the river, collecting samples and generally making sure all was working.

The sheep up on the hill above the river have their own way of warming each other up:



but I really quite need the sun to come out once in a while. Early yesterday evening, it did just that, and everything felt much better:



This morning all was back to evil showers, though.

Preparations

As H1N1 (the current Swine Flu variant) starts it's journey through the UK we're hectically trying to get ready in time to measure its effect on sewage effluents and rivers:



This might not look like science to you...but the hi-tech part starts in the lab :)

For less snap-shotty water photos visit Watery Wednesdays, hosted by 2SweetnSaxy.

Watery Wednesday - Back to now

In the cloud forest I looked at droplets moving from the gaseous phase of their life back to a watery one. These days I'm working on where these droplets go for the next stage of the water cycle and what happens to them there. The River Kennet, which is one of the rivers I work on, is a chalk stream which would under non-polluted conditions be totally clear. The stretch on which the photo is taken, however, isn't - and nobody quite knows why (that's why it is being researched). Still, there are some plants growing and the water is clear enough to be able to see the bottom:



Matters could be far worse, as for example in the Riachuelo, a tributary of the River Plate. Apparently it is the third most polluted river in the world - but it doesn't really need any official credentials. One can smell it from some 300m away and it looks pretty toxic - it must be a hotbed of fantastically interesting microbes:



For more water photos visit Watery Wednesdays.

Springwatch

It's coming - hooray! Here are it's first traces at the River Kennet near Marlborough: