ML138463
People
Contributor
Date
Location
- Age
- Not specified
- Sex
- Not specified
- Playback
- Not specified
Media notes
Subject 1: (Interview). Subtitle: Greg Ruiz. Timecode In: 00:00:26. Timecode out: 00:41:50. Notes: Marine invasive species. Subject 2: (Interview). Subtitle: Jim Carlton. Timecode In: 00:41:50. Timecode out: 01:25:39. Notes: Marine invasive species. Subject 3: (Interview). Subtitle: Greg Ruiz. Timecode In: 01:40:59. Timecode out: 01:58:14. Notes: Marine invasive species. Habitat: ; ; Equipment Notes: Stereo=1; Decoded MS stereo. NPR/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY RADIO EXPEDITIONS: "Oceans of Life" LOG #1 of ALIEN SPECIES Interview with Jim Carlton & Greg Ruiz 00:30 GR: I'm Dr. Greg Ruiz, and we are at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.. and this is an aquarium room that we use to hold organisms, and what you see in this tank is a small square that's about 13 cm on a side, it's a solid substrate that we put out in Chesapeake Bay region, and we have these now out at 50 different sites that we use to collect the organisms that colonize hard substrates like pure pilienes (?) and rocks, and they are collected to allow us to figure out what species are present in Chesapeake Bay. In particular we are interested in learning which new species may be arriving and invading the Chesapeake Bay region through ballast water that is released by ships. 1:27 AC: What are these -RWSRP 2 that's a designation for what's in this quite small holding aquarium with a little air pump going in it. It's maybe 6 inches by 15 inches by 9 inches high. What's in there? I see tiny shrimp-like things in there, kind of floating around, maybe ah -they look like um - GR: Amphipods, little crustaceans - AC: maybe a quarter of an inch at the most long -not even that ¬maybe an eighth ¬ 2:10 GR: those are amphipods. It's a small crustacean related to crabs, and this tank is actually a tank that housed one of those settling plates just a half hour ago, that was taken to another laboratory to identify the species that are there. The species that we find on these settling plates are both sessile invertebrates, those that don't move as well as mobile invertebrates, and sometimes fish. And so what's left in this tank are some of the mobile fauna. And in this other tank adjacent to it you can see a settling plate with barnacles and hydroids, and a variety of other organisms as well as some of the same crustaceans swimming around in the water. 2:56 AC: What's a hydroid? GR: It's related to the sea anemone, and it's more of an erect form, and it has a group of tentacles that it uses to capture food. 3:09 AC: If you look in this little tank here, are these alien species? 3:14 GR: That's what we are interested in finding out, and at first look it's difficult to say, because they are quite small to the naked eye and so what we do is we take these organisms and look at them under the microscope and identify them based on the knowledge that we have as well as by sending them out to known experts of the taxonomy of any particular group, which may be at the smithsonian National Museum of Natural History or it maybe another museum or academic institution someplace else in the world. 3:56 ambi: sound in the room -a loud buzzing in the background, and faint trickling of water (dripping from the aquarium tubes?) 4:15 AC: What's that there? GR: That's a small fish; a gobi. 4:21 AC: And that came off of one of your plates? 4:23 GR: It did. It's probably a naked gobi which is a native species resident in much of the Chesapeake Bay. We often catch naked gobies and sometimes crabs, and occasionally blenius, on the settling plates that we bring in. 4:42 AC: These are not a problem, these are native fish - GR: these are part of the native fauna that are resident here. one of the difficult things though, as you might imagine, is that on these plates across chesapeake bay we encounter perhaps 100, 150 different species, and its difficult to say for c... (Notes truncated)
Technical information
- Recorder
- Microphone
- Accessories
Archival information
- Cataloged
- 23 Mar 2005 - Ben Brotman
- Digitized
- 23 Mar 2005 - Ben Brotman
- Edited
- 23 Mar 2005 - Ben Brotman