In-house testing with organisms.

Well, I'm back.
After over a year of attempts (and $$), I've finally succeeded in starting and maintaining a healthy culture of Hyalella organisms.  This is an enormously important milestone!

The dark spots on the white gauze are Hyalella..

 Here's what they look like really up close:

[I did not take this one... photo was borrowed from an online source]

In fact, it's been so successful... they're proliferating rather quickly.  I went from one small bag of 100 organisms, to this:

and now I'm up to this:

We start excavation in the backyard for the pool later this summer... just kidding.

I now will be able to more frequently test synthediment recipes on real live biological organisms, the type that live in natural sediment, and get feedback information much quicker.  This is the break I've been needing to make quicker progress.  My wonderful Partner-Labs have gone above and beyond their everyday work to provide me with some very good data-feedback.  I will continue working with them because they have access to biological species that I do not.  But this Hyalella culture breakthrough will help things move along at a faster pace.

I have worked out a certain combination of fine particles (in terms of types and amounts) that make the material "sticky" or cohesive.  This is very important to some organisms who need that kind of sediment for successful construction of their "burrow" habitats.  They do not like sediment that is loose and flowing (like sand) because their excavation only collapses as quickly as they dig.   I'm presenting this work at a scientific conference in November.

I had a bit of bad timing with that cohesion work: the batches I sent to labs with access to "burrowing" organisms were sent just a few weeks BEFORE I finally worked out the composition and combination.  Here are two photos that illustrate how the early synthetic material failed to function like natural sediment. 

One of my early synthediment recipes...

... looks nothing like the real stuff!!

Those little burrows and tracks in the lower photo are the tell-tell signs of healthy living benthos. They are conspicuously absent from my synthediment batch!  Although these results were "negative" in the sense that these batches were not suitable to the organisms, they were positive in that they provide valuable information to guide future adjustments.  As has been said, "science IS a continuing process..."

So the next stages of development will involve lots of experiments exposing Hyalella to batches of synthediment in my own lab, and will focus on adding organic material to the most successful mineral recipes.  Onward!