Jake Adams

Full and part-time professional aquarist July 1997 – present. I was the manager of primarily marine aquarium stores in Denver and Atlanta from May 1999 - May 2001 and I was an aquarium consultant and performed private aquarium servicing for a retail aquarium company from June 2002-August 2004.

Baruch Institute Seawater Culture and Aquarium Facility design and maintenance technician. August 2002-present. I have set-up and maintained a variety of aquatic systems to house organisms from tropical and temperate benthic, reef, lagoon and intertidal habitats for educational, research and demonstration purposes.

Co-host for the advanced discussion forum of the international reef aquarium Internet bulletin board, www.zeovit.com .

Fresh and saltwater aquarist since 1996. I have housed aquatic organism from nearly all major phyla and classes with many individuals performing successful reproduction.

I am a senior in marine science at the University of South Carolina. I work in a physiology lab and I will continue studying coral physiology and ecology in Grad school .

ABSTRACT:

In May of 2004 I was awarded a Howard Hughes undergraduate research fellowship to examine the effect of water flow on the photosynthesis and respiration of Pocillopora damicornis . For this research project I was responsible for teaching myself how to use and calibrate a fiber optic oxygen sensor and I designed a water flow chamber setup that would at once produce sufficiently strong, mostly laminar flow patterns while also minimizing the change in temperature of the closed vessel. At the end of the program I gave a presentation of my results and I have continued to do additional experiments with the same equipment setup. My results show that there is strong linear correlation between water flow and subsequent respiration and photosynthesis as measured by oxygen release and uptake under variable flow speeds. I would like to present my results to an aquarium hobbyist audience and use scientifically produced data to show how critical water flow speed is in our aquaria.