One of the remarkable things about working in the U.S. Antarctic Program (USAP) is that there is an incredible amount of support on site at McMurdo Station. Since our research project involves setting up a system to bubble CO₂ into our larval culturing buckets - an activity that involves a lot of widgets and moving parts - we are enormously grateful for this support.  To begin, we first needed to prepare our buckets that will eventually become the culturing vessels that hold our embryonic and larval sea urchins.

Below is Chuck up at the Carp Shop as he works with Pauline to drill the holes into the buckets.

Bravo 134 is proud to report that Lydia has started her career as a bucketologist and, with glue gun in hand, is powering through fabrication, placing mesh over the holes that were drilled in the Carp Shop. 

Once the buckets are ready, they placed into a seawater tank here in the aquarium room in the Crary labs. For our cultures, the incoming seawater needs to be filtered; see Paul below setting up the filter apparatus.

In addition, the Carp built this frame for us; it will hold the buckets in place when we begin our CO₂ experiments. 

The embryos and larvae in the culture buckets will be gently stirred by paddles driven by small motors. Paula, the E Tech in Crary, has been helping us with motor fabrication. She is shown here making 'twisted pair' for the motor assembly.

Finally, all this activity requires a lot of communication. Here is Dr. Yu taking a last minute phone call before she dashes out into the field!