Reef nutrition

Free leather and Kenya Tree corals

These softies have taken over my aquaria at work and I need to make room for some hard corals. These are big, healthy, and easy to keep soft corals. I'll rip them off the rocks for you when you arrive. See the pics. Pick up in the Stanford School of Medicine, although I go to the East Bay pretty regularly and might be able to meet you there.

Priority will go to BAR supporting members, but I doubt many of them will want these "weedy" corals.

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These softies have taken over my aquaria at work and I need to make room for some hard corals. These are big, healthy, and easy to keep soft corals. I'll rip them off the rocks for you when you arrive. See the pics. Pick up in the Stanford School of Medicine, although I go to the East Bay pretty regularly and might be able to meet you there.

Priority will go to BAR supporting members, but I doubt many of them will want these "weedy" corals.

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Would love a leather! Pm sent


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The tank is at SoM? I’m work on campus but obviously not now until SIP is over.

Is the tank for research or just enjoyment? I know Biology has fresh water research planted tanks.
 
The tank is at SoM? I’m work on campus but obviously not now until SIP is over.

Is the tank for research or just enjoyment? I know Biology has fresh water research planted tanks.
The aquaria are in Lane building. Our lab (John Pringle's lab) studies cnidarian-dinoflagellate symbioses. We mostly work with aiptasia in lab, but some of my lab mates have done work on corals as well. The aquaria are primarily for enjoyment and outreach (showing a bit of diversity of corals and other marine life to students), but I am planning experiments on Montipora and Acropora species as well and need to make some room in the bigger tank to try and grow out some frags before I start the experiments.

Some leathers went to @Adit0 today, but there are still more and plenty of Kenya Trees (Capnella sp.) as well.
 
The aquaria are in Lane building. Our lab (John Pringle's lab) studies cnidarian-dinoflagellate symbioses. We mostly work with aiptasia in lab, but some of my lab mates have done work on corals as well. The aquaria are primarily for enjoyment and outreach (showing a bit of diversity of corals and other marine life to students), but I am planning experiments on Montipora and Acropora species as well and need to make some room in the bigger tank to try and grow out some frags before I start the experiments.

Some leathers went to @Adit0 today, but there are still more and plenty of Kenya Trees (Capnella sp.) as well.
Sounds interesting. What sort of experiments will you be running?
 
Sounds interesting. What sort of experiments will you be running?
I'm critically testing the dominant hypothesis about how heat-stress causes symbiotic cnidarian bleaching. I refer to this hypothesis as the reactive oxygen species (ROS)-induced bleaching hypothesis. The original idea, first popularized by Michael Lesser in the 1990s, was that the photosynthetic machinery in symbiotic algae over-produces high-energy electrons when exposed to elevated temperatures (or high-light and other stressors). As the production rate of these high-energy electrons outpaces the algae's ability to concentrate and reduce/fix CO2, the electrons begin to react with with other chemicals in the chloroplast, including oxygen. This produces chemically-reduced oxygen compounds that are powerful oxidizing agents (ROS) including hydrogen peroxide, superoxide, oxygen radicals, hydroxyl radicals, etc. Eventually, these compounds overwhelm the algae's antioxidant defense mechanisms, make their way into the cnidarian host's cells, and begin damaging the cnidarian. If the ROS leakage from the algae overwhelms the cnidarian's antioxidant capacity, it expels the algae (bleaches) as a last-ditch effort to protect itself from oxidative damage (similar to slowly burning).

Early studies seemed to support this hypothesis, and it was among the earliest hypotheses that provided an internally consistent, plausible molecular mechanism that linked various stressors and coral bleaching. However those early experiments were poorly controlled (we all know how difficult it can be to work with these organisms), and more recent publications have raised questions about the validity of the ROS-induced bleaching hypothesis. For example, Acropora and aiptasia bleach just as quickly when exposed to heat-stress in total darkness as they do in light (Tolleter et al., 2013), indicating that photosynthesis is not required for bleaching. It also appears that non-symbiotic aiptasia (aiptasia can be kept alive long-term without symbiotic algae if you feed them regularly) experience more oxidative stress than symbiotic aiptasia (Nii & Muscatine, 1997), and that levels of oxidative stress in these animals correlate with rate of respiration, not the rate of photosynthesis. These findings suggest that if ROS play a role bleaching, the ROS are produced by the cnidarian itself rather than by the algae.

In any case, I've been treating aiptasia with various concentrations of H2O2 to test whether elevated ROS levels can induce bleaching without heat. So far, it appears even lethal doses of H2O2 do not cause bleaching. I've also been heat-stressing aiptasia and testing whether incubation with various antioxidants reduces bleaching. So far, antioxidants don't appear to reduce bleaching during heat-stress. I have more experiments to run and need to repeat these tests on corals as well, but I haven't found any direct evidence that ROS play an important role in bleaching. There are other hypotheses that link heat-stress to bleaching, and I plan on testing some of those as well. But the field of coral biology can't move forward if our theory about why and how corals bleach is fundamentally flawed.
 
Just FYI.... For what's it's worth, I keep a pest tank of now mostly rampant algae and aiptasia in a closed 5G system that has no chillers in an uncontrolled environment (so temperature climbs with weather and then some) nor do I feed. And definitely do no see bleaching occur nor decline in growth. I haven't change water in 2 years and only occassionally top-off... so salinity sometimes hit 1.035+ probably according to last time I measured before shipping some other small nems from the system.

nearly impossible to kill ...or bleach those things except for light deprivation.
 
Just FYI.... For what's it's worth, I keep a pest tank of now mostly rampant algae and aiptasia in a closed 5G system that has no chillers in an uncontrolled environment (so temperature climbs with weather and then some) nor do I feed. And definitely do no see bleaching occur nor decline in growth. I haven't change water in 2 years and only occassionally top-off... so salinity sometimes hit 1.035+ probably according to last time I measured before shipping some other small nems from the system.

nearly impossible to kill ...or bleach those things except for light deprivation.
Wow! That's really salty (~46 ppt)! Interestingly, there is some literature suggesting that higher salinity can protect against bleaching, but your point is well taken: what is true for aiptasia is not necessarily true for reef-building corals. That's why I want to repeat my experiments in Montipora and Acropora species.

In the Pringle Lab at Stanford, we use aiptasia (technically now called Exaiptasia diaphana) as a model organism to study the biology of cnidarian-dinoflagellate symbiosis precisely because aiptasia are so much easier to keep and faster to propagate than corals (and they can be kept alive without symbiotic algae). But as with all model organisms, we have to be careful about generalizing results from laboratory models to entire groups of organisms: E. coli are not the same as all bacteria, mice are not the same as all mammals, and aiptasia are certainly not the same as all symbiotic cnidarians.
 
Yeah, my pest tank was set up in a "Lord of the Flies" approach... let everything naturally play our absent of any intervention --except for the RODI top-off. So have had a lot of things come and go, and change cyclically which has been really interesting and gratifying. Rule is things only go in, nothing comes out -- except for occasional harvesting of aiptasia, ball anemone, etc for sharing. BTW - ball nems also are major survivors in the system.

In case there's interest, I have some spare pavona chips lying around and maybe some pocillopora frags i can give you for your experiments.
 
Yeah, my pest tank was set up in a "Lord of the Flies" approach... let everything naturally play our absent of any intervention --except for the RODI top-off. So have had a lot of things come and go, and change cyclically which has been really interesting and gratifying. Rule is things only go in, nothing comes out -- except for occasional harvesting of aiptasia, ball anemone, etc for sharing. BTW - ball nems also are major survivors in the system.

In case there's interest, I have some spare pavona chips lying around and maybe some pocillopora frags i can give you for your experiments.
Thank you for your offer! For now I'm limiting my coral experiments to Acros and Montis. It will be a while before those experiments commence, as I need to give the Acros time to grow and I need to perform more aiptasia experiments in the meantime. I'll let you know if I decide to try these experiments on a wider array of corals.
 
Unfortunately I've already given away all the corals I had to give. I could still scrape some Kenya Trees out of another tank and maybe a couple blue Discosoma mushroom corals, but I'm not sure it is worth your time to come get them unless you're really closeby...

Yeah, there is one cnidarian-algal symbiosis lab at Stanford! The research is interesting but difficult: it's tough to work with these organisms because they aren't established model systems. While my labmates have made huge progress manipulating the genes of Aiptasia and some corals (an essential first step in developing an organism as a model system), we still don't have any mutant adults of Aiptasia or corals. Lots of work to be done!
 
Hi Gabe,

I am just down in the Campbell area so pretty close by! I would be interested mainly in the mushrooms if possible, I will PM you when I have a chance to stop by.

And that is awesome! Read more about what you are doing above, looks like quite the process, good lucky in your endeavors!
 
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