Marine Lakes Project 2016 -Wageningen University –

This past June we were happy to host Diede and friends at the RARCC, researchers from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, doing research on marine lakes in Raja Ampat. Read their report here! Marine Lakes Report

“We are three researchers from Wageningen University in the Netherlands. We focus on questions on community assembly and acclimatization potential of marine organisms. In May and June we conducted a fieldwork expedition to Raja Ampat, Indonesia. This area, with its incredibly high biodiversity, is especially interesting for us because it holds many ‘marine lakes’, which are bodies of seawater with no surface connection to the ocean. These lakes are particularly interesting because they resemble predicted climate change scenarios: they have high water temperatures and are more acidic than the ocean. With the aid of RARCC we were able to visit several of these lakes in the vicinity of Kri. Since the lakes vary in environmental conditions (e.g. temperature, pH), they provide model systems in which we want to study how communities form and how the individual species cope with these conditions. Also thanks to RARCC we were able to collect good samples, which we can’t wait to analyse!” – Diede, Christiaan, and Maria