Week seven of the program, week two of August, and I can say with confidence that summer has finally arrived in Coos Bay. I'm wearing shorts and short sleeves most days of the week and sunburn has become a genuine concern at lunchtime. I think that the strangely stable weather bubble we're in here has added to the unreality of time that I and some of the other REUs keep noting in these blogs, but it seems like summer has finally broken through the fog.
I am missing the summer storms and temperamental Virginia weather, though. I did experience a super heavy fog that felt almost like rain one evening at the beach with Randi and Riley (I wore my $3 Goodwill rain jacket for the first time - the pocket ripped within an hour), though the locals tell me you have to wait until the cooler months for real rain. My larvae seemed to weather the nutrition drought that we accidentally put them through by flooding their diets with Dunaliela (weather...drought...flood...I'm working with the theme here). Since switching them to a diet of Rhodomonas (red algae) alone, they've grown significantly and I was able to start a new feeding trial with treatments: Tiarina (the cilliate), Rhodomonas, Tiarina + Rhodomonas, and a starvation treatment as a control. I put 20 larvae in each treatment and thought that 100 tiarina daily would be enough to call it an "ad libitum" diet, but I was surprised to come in the next day to see all of the tiarina eaten. This potentially poses an issue for the feeding experiment since we haven't been able to culture tiarina in the lab. Instead, I've had to sort through plankton tows multiple times a week to get enough to use. Like the weather, plankton composition is both seasonal and temperamental, and we're starting to see tiarina less and less frequently. Because of this shift in the plankton and the surprising voracity of the acinotrochs, we may have to *pivot* again if I'm not able to consistently find enough tiarina to feed my larvae to reliably tell whether they are growing on this diet or not. I also have a new roommate. I'm watching Pigg while Randi is on their research cruise, so we've been getting used to each others' habits and routines this week. I figured if I'm already taking care of thousands of pet actinotrochs, what's one pug? Plus, Pigg is much cuddlier than a microscopic baby worm and easier to take care of in some ways. Notably, that I don't have to go fishing for his dinner.
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As the weeks pass, time seems to speed up here. It becomes increasingly difficult to remember what I did each week and the days start to blur together as we all begin to slip and slide on the downhill slope of the program.
Temporal landmarks are helpful though, and a big one was last weekend when we went to Eugene for 24 hours. We saw the sights, ate the food, swam in the rivers, and zoned out on the highways with our local tour guides Randi and Madison. It was nice to get away from our small town of Charleston and to see a new side of Oregon that we hadn't before. Things came back into focus in lab on Monday when we realized that all of the actinotroch cultures I've been keeping weren't actually growing on the algal diet we'd been feeding them. We'd been feeding them a mix of green and red algae (Dunaliela and Rhodomonas, respectively) but by taking a closer look at the larvae, it seems like they can't actually digest the green algae, and they were basically just filling up on these cells but not actually getting any nutrients from them which impeded their growth. I sort of imagine it like eating a bag of cotton balls or something - lots of volume with nothing to it. Additionally, all of the oldest actinotrochs have gone through catastrophic metamorphosis. This is the actual scientific term for the way they change into their adult forms, but with these larvae it was REALLY catastrophic. I'm not sure why, but they all sort of just degenerated after reaching what seemed like maximum larval development without actually succeeding in forming a juvenile body. So I'm left with a bunch of grotesque looking larvae...some with more parts than others, some dead, some still swimming weakly, and others dissolved into a little pile of goo at the bottom of the dish...it's not a pretty scene. So we pivot. That has seemed like the buzz word of the week around here. I started new cultures of larvae using only Rhodomonas so hopefully those will grow quickly enough to start a new feeding trial soon. In the meantime, I'm still taking data from the preliminary feeding trial for practice and using the younger larvae left over to create images of the ciliary flow patterns around actinotrochs to see how they draw in algal cells and other prey from nearby in the water. Outside of lab, my evenings have had a surprisingly ritual feel to them: dinner, walk with Randi and Pigg to the beach, shower, make tea, watch Twilight with Randi and Madison. It somehow came up that I had never seen any of the Twilight movies, which was unacceptable and has been amended this week, as we've watched all five of them in five consecutive nights. I want to share some lessons I've learned from watching the Twilight series for the first time at age 20, 14 years after the release of the original Twilight film: 1. Things are more enjoyable if you don't take them seriously. Maybe this isn't always true, but it's probably true most of the time. Once I let myself get past the awful CGI, the insane plot, the bad acting and worse dialogue, I found myself genuinely enthralled by the movies and counting down the hours until we would rendezvous in the dining hall with our projector and snacks for the next installment. Most things in life are meant to be enjoyed simply, not dissected or obsessed over. Tacky is beautiful, campy is Shakespearean. Vive la bad taste. I'm learning to enjoy things as they are, not as they could be. 2. #TeamBellaAlone Neither Jacob nor Edward were good for Bella and it's a shame she didn't see that. They both sucked honestly. This is probably a lesson in independence. I saw Bella's happy ending with Edward as more of a "what not to do" guidebook to life (afterlife?) than something to emulate. Spoiler alert: she's immortal! Why does she need to get married and have a baby at 18 when she'll live forever?? Anyway. Randi said something this week along the lines of "you only have you for the rest of your life," which I think is good advice. Especially for Bella who is immortal. And for the mortal, maybe it reminds us that our short lives are ours alone, and we should be picky about who gets to live it with us. 3. It's never too late. For Bella or for me. For Bella, I like to imagine a future where she gets to live on her own and get a hobby or a job or an individual personality maybe. She has eternity, so I hope she doesn't spend it believing she's really tied to Edward till death do them part. As for me, this movie marathon was a bit of a redemption for childhood Chloe. I never saw the Twilight movies when they were all the rage in my various friend groups and I felt like I probably never would, having missed the boat by over a decade. All the cool girls liked Twilight. I wasn't a cool girl and I didn't want to be. But, as I pointed out in Twilight Lesson #1, I'm getting over taking myself too seriously. I did like Twilight, and I think I would have liked it even better when I was 12. But thanks to Randi and Madison, I get it now. Now I can talk about it with the girls who were cool when they were 12. So I'm learning it is never too late to do something. You're never too old, and actually, you're only ever getting older (unlike Bella) so you might as well do that thing now, whatever it is. Now that I have sufficient evidence for macrophagous planktotrophy in actinotroch larvae, I've started to shift my focus to feeding trials to see how different diets impact larval growth. I'm setting up larval treatments with three diets: phytoplakton alone, phytoplankton plus tiarina, and tiarina alone - I've labeled them "vegetarian," "omnivore," and "carnivore" larvae. I'm realizing those aren't the best treatment names though since tiarina is a protist (not an animal) and somehow the diet names make me feel like I'm anthropomorphizing my larvae...anyway....
I took images of last week's fixed and stained larvae using the confocal microscope to get images of the musculature and cell boundaries in larvae at various stages. We found that the tentacles of the larvae have non-beating cilia coming from collar cells that line each of the tentacles and that the hood lacks these structures. This leads us to think that the tentacles of the larvae are important sensory organs that can detect prey in the water and that the hood likely responds to information from the tentacles but can't actually sense prey in the same way. My oldest actinotroch larvae have developed blood which is a cool feature of this specific larval form. Their blood contains hemoglobin which is the same oxygen-carrying protein that makes human blood red, so it's pretty identifiable in the otherwise clear-bodied larvae. It's also sort of rare to see such analogous structures to humans when studying invertebrate biology, so maybe that's adding to my temptation to anthropomorphize the little guys. Or maybe I'm just spending too much time looking at them and now I'm starting to go crazy. Who knows! This week was also an interesting one for me personally. Not necessarily in a concrete, tangible event kind of way. I've just sort of had this realization slowly creep into the back of my mind that I am more free than I thought I was. I'll try to explain. When I got my driver's license it was a similar feeling and I felt it again when I moved into my first apartment away from home. I think it's something like contentment with being on my own, with realizing that home is anywhere you make it. As I've gotten to know the people here and fallen in love with Oregon, I think I've realized that I could live here. That I could be home here. And although I love Oregon and the people in it, I think it's more to do with me than it is with where I actually am. I believe that the fact that I feel this about Oregon means that I could feel this about anywhere, which makes the world feel a lot smaller to me. I am free-er than I realized because now I know that I'm not like a tube worm. I don't have to make my home in one place in the mud and stay there forever. I can carry home with me more like how a snail carries its shell. And unlike any invertebrate, I can buy a plane ticket and get places much faster than with snail-power alone. Now I'm feeling too earnest and self-conscious as I read that paragraph back so I'll end it there. I've been listening to Big Thief a lot this week, and this line from their song "Vegas" really seemed to resonate with these thoughts of home: "Tell me when we grow up do we ever go home? / You said home becomes the highway" Maybe that reads a little more rock-and-roll than how I interpret the song, but it'll do. For your listening pleasure: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAy7MVYmDD0 |
AuthorHello! My name is Chloe and I am from Richmond, Virginia. I am a rising senior at William & Mary studying Biology & English. This summer, I'll be working in Dr. George von Dassow's lab studying larval carnivory. I am excited to learn lots about larval biology and the coastal Oregon ecosystem at OIMB this summer! ArchivesCategories |
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