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Cave µ-Safari in Vranja Jama

Last week we were doing the first expedition into the Karst caves around Ljubljana. While they are famous for their beautiful geological formations, the dark and cold waters of these caves are also the habitat of the Proteus anguinus, also called “Human Fish”. But is there more other life down there? To check this we went for a µ-Cave Safari, equipped with DIY laser-projectors, MobileLabs, plankton-nets, starving low-nutritious agar culture plates and other fun stuff to carry around in the muddy holes.

See some impressions on our meet-up/BioTehna page

To the Caveto_the_caves
After we packed all our gears, got a last bite of some mesni burek and put on our cave-man shoes we headed towards the cave “Vranja Jama”, crossing the Planinskega polja, near Logatec, our cave sherpa Doms’ hometown. We were eager to explore what microscopic lifeforms there might be…

“We suspect that, because limited but chemically complex nutrients enter the cave system, very few microbial species are capable of encoding all the necessary uptake and catabolic reactions to support growth. To overcome this limitation, selfish competition for resources is replaced by cooperative and mutualistic associations, such as have been seen in biofilm communities.”
– from “What’s Up Down There? Microbial Diversity in Caves”, Barton et al

Temporary VJ Lab-in-a-Cave
Cave_VJ-lab

What we found
Of course, next to investigating the microscopic life of the cave, we also saw the “Human Fish” (german name is “Grottenolm”) and we wont hide our brilliantly sharp picture of it :-). Besides that, we found loooaads of earthworms in the mud, moths, spider webs, some fungi and bones of various animals (maybe bats).
human_fish

Back to the “OUTSIDE…”
finally_back_out


“Last week we were doing the first expedition into the Karst caves around Ljubljana. While they are famous for their beautiful geological formations, the dark and cold waters of these caves are also the habitat of the Proteus anguinus, also called “Human Fish”. But is there more other life down there? To check this we went for a µ-Cave Safari, equipped with DIY laser-projectors, MobileLabs, plankton-nets, starving low-nutritious agar culture plates and other fun stuff to carry around in the muddy holes.

See more info on http://hackteria.org/?p=2734”

From Cave µ-Safari in Vranja Jama. Posted by Marc Dusseiller Dusjagr on 9/02/2013 (24 items)

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  2. […] to the caves… Caves are nice! During the Summer of 2013, besides laser micro-life projectors, we explored various ideas of sonification of life forms and site-specific performances. Such as […]


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