Worms in the lab

Last week I set up my third (and for the time being, last) experiment with earthworms. This time I give them different levels of CO2 in the air to see if that has an influence on granule production. The species of earthworms I use is Lumbricus terrestris. One of the most common species you’ll find in your average European garden. I order them at a company that sell them for fishing, and who actually get them from Canada, where they have been introduced by Europeans to improve agriculture. In Canada they even have worm vending machines.

In the lab the worms each get their own bag of moist soil ad horse manure (food) and are kept in darkness and at constant temperature. To achieve the different CO2 levels they are then put in so-called gloveboxes through whcih air with a constant CO2 level is pumped.

Two gloveboxes containing 6 bags-of-soil-with-worm.

And now I wait.

Freshwater mussels record droughts

To make a long story short, the freshwater mussels that grew in the monitoring experiment for over a year, indeed nicely recorded the environment. In this case that means their shell oxygen isotopic composition (δ¹⁸O values) reflected the δ¹⁸O values and temperature of the water they were living in:

water δ¹⁸O + temperature → shell δ¹⁸O

relationship between discharge (Q) and water oxygen isotope composition (δ18Ow) in the river Meuse (The Netherlands).

The next thing to find out was if this could be used to reconstruct floods or droughts in a river. In the river Meuse, there is a logarithmic relationship between discharge and water δ¹⁸O values.

By analysing shells from a wet time interval (1912-1918) and an extremely dry time interval (1969-1977) we found out that droughts with a very low river discharge are readily recorded by the shells. This is logical if you look at the graph. The water δ¹⁸O composition does not change very much between average and high discharges, but values become much higher when discharges (Q) are very low (at the left side of the graph).

This means that when we are going to analyse old shells, from archaeological finds or palaeogeographical samples in the Meuse River area, we will be able to recognise droughts.

If you’re interested in reading the full story, it can be found here (open access – free of charge).

Mussel experiments

To find out if and organism nicely records its environment, you need to do experiments in which variations in the environment are manipulated or closely monitored. In case of freshwater mussels it it not very easy to keep them happy and alive in an aquarium, so I did the experiments in the field. The two field sites were fish ladders in the rivers Rhine and Meuse, that are made for enabling migratory fish to move upriver past a dam or weir.

Freshwater mussels do not attach themselves like blue mussels do, but sit in the mud instead. They can move around quite a bit and muskrats think they’re delicious, so we devised a steel cage for them to live in. I collected some mussels from the river Linge, and bought some other in the pet shop (yes, they sell them there, because people apparently like to have them in their garden ponds). Collection of animals and installation of these experiments involves a lot of work with waders on, and can sometimes be quite cold!

The fish ladder at Lith (Meuse).

Installing the cage at Hagestein.

Collecting mussels from the Linge.

Eifel

When I was a child my parents told me about the dormant volcanos in the Eifel, but I never had the opportunity to see them. So of course I could not resist joining the Eifel field trip after last week’s conference in Frankfurt. Although it’s not really the general subject of this blog I like to share some pictures, because it’s so much fun to learn something new.

CO2 geyser at Wallendorf.

A crater rim.

CO2 bubbling up in Laacher See.

Thick layers of ash, including pyroclastic surges, from the Laacher See eruption.

Biogeosciences

A paper I wrote is now open for discussion, while it’s also in review. We discuss how mussels can record meltwater off the Greenland coast. Since this is an open access journal everybody can read it and comment on it, so feel free.