Power of serendipity and chance are immense in science. I am not speaking now about Alexandr Fleming forgetting about petri dish at the work bench for a week and getting penicillin as a result... It is rather about the power of occasional meeting, unexpected networking or conversation, which leading to the beautiful ideas appearing, prolific cooperation are starting, and unlikely discoveries are coming into light. It was totally like that for mine cooperation with incredible people from the Marine Biodiversity Research Group from the Plymouth Marine Laboratory.
Building of PML...
... and lovely moor-pond in its garden.
Early May 2014, when i just had started my current position, and was really new to the field of bioturbation (i.e. all mechanical activity which animals and plants performing in the aquatic and terrestrial sediments. You can find out more about in from excellent review by Kristensen et al., (2012)), my supervisor, Dr Jörg Lewandowski, suggested me to attend his "favorite small conference" - "Nereis Park: world of bioturbation" - largest international gathering of people who obsessed with different creatures digging burrows in the marine and freshwater moods (bioturbation is of course much more than just burrow digging - this processes are actually contribute immensely in persistence of marine and freshwater food webs, ecosystem health, and even climate!).
Group foto from the 4th Nereis Park Conference, Plymouth, July 2014
Nereis usb stick. Best conference goody bag ever! Only in PML.
Yep, largest gathering of bioturbation experts.
Nevertheless, during the conference i done a lot of networking, and met some incredible people like incredibly energetic and innovative researchers from the Marine Biodiversity group of PML - Dr Steve Widdicombe and Dr Ana Queiros. They both are doing work on the very cutting edge of the modern marine biology, mainly in the field of ocean acidification and other effects of the global climate change on marine ecosystems. I with my freshwater background was stunned with scopes and scale of work done in PML, and by other marine researcher from all over the world, me and my supervisor were the only freshwater scientist in the presentation room. Talk of my supervisor was met with great enthusiasm, as apparently, we in freshwater (and in our working group in particular) science having lots of ideas very useful for marine community. What was surprising for me, hoverer, is that my own talk also have been met with considerable enthusiasm and feedback from audience. Apparently, ideas i was presenting were relevant for all those cool marine biologist too!
In fact i even got a best student talk award (to my shock) - not because of the quality of my science probably, but rather because of the novelty of my ideas to community.
Just as I said - Plymouth is charming!
I love Plymouth Hoe!
Building atop of the hill, with a flagpole,is a British Marine Biological Association (MBA) - what a spot to place a marine research institution!
Anyway - i was charmed by Plymouth and excited by work of people from PML, so while i was looking at the green moors of Devon, which inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for his "Hound of the Baskervilles", from the window of the bus taking me to the Heathrow, somewhere deep in my mind i start thinking about working with this people, in this lovely city...
...year and a half (and lots of planning) later i come back to the Plymouth, as a part of my scondments in UK, in frames of EU Interfaces project, armed with flurometers, fluorescent tracers and lots of enthusiasm and expectations. Ana, Steve and me have designed an experiment which, if succeed, will taught us more about the role of bioturbators in the marine ecosystems. We have combined more traditional particulate tracers, which widely used in marine biology with liquid chemical tracers, widely applied in studies of the hydrology of the rivers.
Sampling the sediment and animals in the Cawsand ,bay on board the research vessel "Plymouth Quest" with Dr Ana Queiros, October 2015.
So far everything was going just fine....
... and then we got a sediment. :)
Kingsand from sea.
Meeting the MBA research vessel "Sepia".
Hydrological solute tracers are widely used in river ecology and hydrology to trace the flowpathes...
...and particulate tracers (green-ish cover on the sediment in the tanks) are widely used to access the bioturbation intensity. We have tried to combine both methods.
Our "lab rats" - Amphiura filiformis (and occasional Amphiothrix sp in the upper left corner). All animals were released back to the Cawsand bay after the experiments.
Sieving sediment in the lab.
Excellent climate-controlled mesocosm facility of the PML, where experiments were conducted.
Work in progress: seting-up the microcoms.
We have applied this both sets of methods on the common European deposit -feeder brittle star (Amphiura filiformis). Currently we are working hard in order to process the data obtained, we do not quite sure what exactly we will learn from 'em, but one is certain- the unexpected encounter from people working in the totally different area of science has lead to the great cooperative project, which opens great possibilities - both for science and to me - to learn more, meet new people and to absorbe ideas, to which i would never be exposed if not because the power of chance!
P.S. Just want to use this occasion to express my sincere gratitude to Ana, Steve, Nick, Gennadi, Joana, Saskia, Sara, crew of the "Plymouth Quest" and all other incredible people of PML who made this cooperation possible!
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