A day of learning, a night of drinking

Last night me and Ellie (from Plymouth uni) where invited to stay at the IUI after working hours by American Ellie (a PhD student).

During working hours:

Margarita (Phd student I am helping with her copepod project), Amatzia (director of the IUI/ me and Margarita's supervisor) and I are still awaiting the lab engineer's (Moty's) return to begin experimentation.

Nonetheless, their was plenty to do. Maya, a previous masters student of Amatzia's returned to the IUI to present her finished masters project to all of us.

Her masters project had recently been published so, as is tradition here, she brought a cake with her.
Her project was to understand why certain soft corals (pictured above) exhibit a pulsating motion with their tentacles.

Video of soft coral pulsating

Although this video claims that the coral are 'eating', these corals do not feed on plankton and rely solely on photosynthesis. So why do they pulsate in this way as it clearly uses up valuable energy?

Well, Maya discovered that the pulsating pushes away water that it has already depleted of CO2 (needed for photosyntheses) and filled with O2 (a waste product of photosynthesis). By moving this O2 rich water away it can better photosynthesise.

Amatzia later described, in a lecture he was giving to the resident undergraduates, that hard corals rely on reef fish taking shelter within their branches to move water away from them as they swim.

After the working day:

I finished around 5 o'clock (normal time) so I had three hours until the BBQ, so I did what most people at the IUI do when they have some spare time, went for a snorkel on the coral reef that fringes the IUI and the shore for miles in each direction. (I will write extensively on the coral reef once Kim's underwater camera arrives in the post.... Love you babe).

Anyway by the time I stepped foot on land again, the food preparations for the BBQ were well under way so I helped by scavenging some wooden pallets with American Ellie's Russian boyfriend who lives and works in Eilat.

Once the fire was started, the food was brought out and all nine of us sat around with beers, shared knowledge of our home countries (England, America, Russia, Italy and Israel) and got progressively more drunk. The perfect end to any week of hard work.