Does High Salinity Make a Difference During Bleaching?
To find out if salinity affects the symbiosis of Aiptasia and its algal symbionts, we thought of an experiment. Aiptasia were kept in three different levels of salinity: low, medium, and high, at a control temperature of 25°C. This temperature is known to be the best for anemones without creating any additional stress. After they got used to their level of salinity, half of the anemones from each salinity level were put under heat stress, by increasing the temperature to 34°C, a temperature that resulted in bleaching. To measure how much the Aiptasia in each group bleached, we counted the algal symbionts living in them. Since bleaching is a visible process (causing see-through vs. brown anemones), we also took pictures to illustrate our results.
After 8 days of heat stress, we looked at our anemones and investigated whether salinity affected how much they bleached. Looking at Figures 2A,B, do you see differences between the anemones in the low, medium, and high salinity after the heat stress?
