Working in the Invertebrate Collection

The invertebrate collection at NIWA has thousands of jars of marine invertebrate. Scientists identify the creature inside the jar then each jar needs to be labelled and entered on the database. Sometimes the ethanol needs to be changed so I carefully remove the creature inside and clean out the jar before adding new ethanol. The ethanol helps to preserve the creature.

Cool Crabs

These are some crabs that we got to look out. They were collected near Antarctica and have been living in the freezer at NIWA. The scientist was thawing them out to identify them and label them. I thought they were really cute but then decided that this wasn't a very scientific word!

Paralomis Crab
Photo - Kerry Harrison - NIWA

Baby King Crab and Adult King Crab

Photo - Kerry Harrison - NIWA

Photo - Kerry Harrison - NIWA

Baby King Crab

Oysters, Oysters and more Oysters

Removing the heart with tweezers
Photo - NIWA - Kerry Harrison

Dabbing heart cells onto microscope slide

Photo- NIWA - Kerry Harrison

This week I have been working with a team who is testing oysters for the parasite Bonamia. Each year samples of oysters from Bluff are tested to see how much Bonamia is present. Bonamia is not harmful to humans but it can quickly kill a whole lot of oysters.

The process involves measuring the oyster then opening up the oyster with a sharp knife, (I was not very good at this) being careful not to destroy the flesh inside too much. Then you use a pair of tweezers to carefully pull out the heart. The heart is then dabbed on a microscope slide (I was good at this part). After that the heart is placed in a small vial with ethanol. We also cut out gill samples and a cross section of part of the oyster for testing too.

I did feel a bit sorry for the oysters as you could see them contract as you reached for their heart. I guess as a scientist you have to get used to that.

Before the slides are looked at under the microscope they had to be fixed and dyed so the cells could easily be seen.

I got to look at the slides under the microscope to see what Bonamia looks like (small blobs).

As a scientist doing this job you had to work carefully so that the oyster information was not mixed up. All samples had to be clearly labeled and tracked back to the oyster it came from. We used pencils for recording the information because they still worked when wet.

Each day we were able to take home about 2 dozen oysters. Shame I don't like them.

NIWA Collections

While at NIWA I am based in the Invertebrates Collection. This houses over 100,000 samples of sea invertebrates, mostly kept in jars of ethanol or formalin.

So far I have been involved with helping to maintain the samples by rehousing them in new jars with clean ethonal, updating the database and relabeling them.

I have seen some pretty cool creatures.

You have to work in a systematic way so that samples and labels are not mixed up.

Here is a photo of a large starfish in the collection.

(Photo - NIWA - Kerry Harrison)