The only thing is that these tanks are all situated in greenhouses and it's impossible to make it completely blackout. The tanks are as tall as my shoulders and there are 18 of them in each greenhouse (there are 2 greenhouses). We also would just empty the water and refil it with bow river water (we have a hookup and a hose that feeds us bow river water). For experiment purposes we need to filter this incoming water which isnt usually a problem at all, but because of all the flooding and rain, the water is so full of suspended silt that there is no way we can filter this water at this time. also it would take far to long to wait for all of the silt to settle because we need to get these experiments running because we only have the summer to run them. Under normal heavy rains we are supposed to give the bow 2 weeks to clear to our normal filtering level, not to mention right now its been raining for the whole month of June and now again it's raining. Really our only option (we cant add chemicals either because this is a closed experiment) is to filter the water already in the tanks into a holding tank and then pump the clear water back into the tanks. Plus each tank has to be kept separate (theyre all diff treatments) and water cannot be mixed between any of the tanks.
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Krissy - student, ecology/biology major, loves nature!
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