During the last tide series we spent a good deal of time fabricating nutrient diffusers out of 2 ft sections of PVC. I bribed the nice young men at Home Depot with cookies and juice to cut up the PVC, which they did by hand, only to find that I could operate the power saw at the OIMB shop with ease. We then drilled big holes into the side of these (Wyatt was the master of this), then suspended 500g of slow release fertilizer within them using women's panty hose. I had a hard time figuring out how other experiments had added the little fertilizer pellets without them spilling out all over the eelgrass bed. I had to e-mail a researcher to find the solution... apparently you aren't aloud to mention nylons in a scientific publication!
This is what the "nut diffs" look like once installed in the field. We also installed "blanks" in the non-nutrient corral plots. The goal is to see if the algae and eelgrass respond to a heavy additional dose of nutrients. This is already a nutrient rich locale, and there is a lot of mixing, so it may be hard to detect a response, but will be very cool if get one! We're going to replace the osmocote fertilizer in August and perhaps September so that there is a constant influx of nutrients available to the corrals.
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