Internship Fun!

On Octpber 4, I went to the HMNS to visit the Hall of Malacology for my internship. Over the summer, I had been slowly taking out rocks and cleaning them and putting them into the quarantine tank until only half of the rocks were left. Christine, my mentor, and I, today, decided that we were going to do a massive push on the tank. We pulled all the rocks out and put them in a separate bucket. We didn't clean the rocks today, but we plan to do it next week. 

This is what the tank looked like after taking out all the rocks. It was pretty dirty. 

We then began siphoning the water and sand from the tank.

This is what the tank looked like after siphoning it for a few minutes. As you can see, we removed a lot of the sand from this side. The bucket we were siphoning the water into filled up, so we had to take it down to the loading dock and dump it out.

We took more water and sand out of the tank until the water level was really low. We then filled the tank back up with filtered fresh water, so that we could continue to siphon water and more sand out of the tank. It is easier to siphon water and sand out of the tank than scoop it out, which is why we continued to add more water so that we could keep siphoning. We did this process of filling up the tank and then siphoning out water and sand about four times, until the majority of the sand was out. Over the next few weeks, we plan to scrub the tank down and run fresh water through it to make sure it is fully clean. We will then add the rocks and the fish back into the tank until it is back to normal.