The final week has arrived! This summer was amazing to say the least. This last week has been full of preparations for our poster symposium on Friday. Putting together the poster was really difficult because there was so much information that I wanted to include but I had a limited amount of space to fit everything. I’m grateful for the advice of Richard, Maya and Nicole. They helped me condense my information down to a manageable size while still retaining the important information of my study. I think for my first poster it turned out nicely and I’m quite happy with the outcome. On Wednesday we got a break from our preparations and went out to Hall Lake. Gina, Sebastian, Colleen, J’mie, Chloe, Annika, Sherlyn, and I had ourselves an adventure in the dunes by the lake. We got to see a beautiful view of Oregon and swim in the lake. We had a really fun time hanging out in the water and also walking around the sandy dunes. I think that was probably the highlight of this entire week, being able to enjoy our remaining time in Oregon basking in the sun. If I ever find myself back here, I would definitely make sure to stop by Hall Lake again. There was no professional development this week or seminar and although it was nice to have time to work on our final posters, it was also sad. I enjoyed the weekly seminars and always learned a lot of new information each time, so not being able to sit in on a seminar this week was sad, but I’m planning on attending some back at my home institution. The day we all prepared for cam on Friday, our poster symposium. Nicole printed out our posters on Wednesday for us and on Friday afternoon I got to see mine on paper for the first time. I think it was really amazing to be able to see all of my work on this poster after obsessing over it for days leading up to our final due date. I was relieved to see how nicely it turned out, and once the initial shock of seeing it, I immediately became nervous about the poster session. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to explain my project clearly or that my poster would be confusing, but it was well received. Once I began to talk to people I started to feel more comfortable about it. Everyone had really wonderful questions and while I was able to answer most of them, there were some questions that I was unable to answer and got me thinking more about future ideas for my particular study. I stopped to see other posters from my fellow interns and it was cool seeing their final products after seeing their poster drafts some time ago. Although I am happy to go home I am certainly going to miss OIMB and all of the friends I made while I was here. I know I’ll also miss Mia (my mentors dog) barking every time me or someone else enters the lab, and learning more about sand dollar larvae each day. I’m so thankful for everyone at OIMB, the mentors, the kitchen staff who kept us well fed, the custodian who made sure everything was taken care of and all others who worked in the background that allowed us to live here comfortably on a day to day basis. Thank you OIMB!
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This past week has been quite a rush. I collected the last of my larvae pictures on Tuesday, and the rest of my time has been dedicated to measuring the larvae and measuring pigment cells. I still have some more to finish, but I’m sure I’ll have everything finished by the end of the weekend. I never realized how time-consuming measuring larvae could be, when I’m measuring 4 of them it isn’t so bad, but multiply 4 by 12 (for the 12 beakers used in total) and then again by 2 (for the 2 days they are photographed throughout treatment time) then suddenly the numbers start to add up. On Tuesday afternoon our professional development was a leadership training session that was given by a faculty member at the University of Oregon. I think the most informative part of the training for me had to have been the session that covered impostorism or imposter syndrome. I learned so much about impostorism, like the fact that there are different types and how the different types differ from each other but are still under the category of imposterism. We all got to view the different types and see how we connected with certain ones, and how we can connect at times to more than just one type. In the end our session leader provided us with tips on how to overcome those feelings and I think it was a wonderful way to learn how we aren’t alone in our feelings because all of us were able to connect in some way to those types of impostorism. We all have been worried about our posters and have been working hard to make sure they are perfect. On Wednesday night we all got together along with Richard, Nicole, and Maya. They all gave us very helpful feedback on our posters most of the feedback was related to the layout of posters and how to make it look organized and easy to read. We also gave feedback to each other on what might look better in terms of layout and organization. This took a little more than 2 hours to go through 11 posters, and I think by the end of it we were all tired, but we were ready with everything we needed to edit our posters the next day. With only one week left I’m wondering where all our time went, it feels like not to long ago we were just arriving to OIMB and meeting our mentors in person for the first time. I’m excited to see the products of all of our efforts this summer come together on a single poster.
The majority of this week I spent collecting or reviewing data, and while it took long hours I enjoyed the process and it went smoothly. Although, there was one night that I dreamt I was surrounded by little swimming Dendraster larvae and I couldn’t get away from them…needless to say it was not a restful sleep, but it’s pretty funny to think about. I have a lot of pictures of larvae to look over and I am hoping to get it done as quickly as possible so I can begin to put that data on a poster we are making. I’m excited though, it’s my first time making a poster and I think it will be cool to see all my work from the past weeks put together in one place. On the weekend Chloe, Sherlyn, Colleen and I went to a thrift shop together so they could search for costumes for the invertebrate ball this week. I sadly will not be able to attend as I am going back to Southern California to go to a Quinceneara, so that should be really fun. I’m excited to be home for a bit and enjoy the warm weather. Even though Oregon has amazing weather, I do miss the hot temperatures of SoCal. As I won’t be here this weekend I will also be missing our CMLC session where we are presenting our project to the local community and visitors of the Marine Center. I would have loved to see all the different ideas and ways that my fellow interns are using to communicate their science to the public. I will be presenting my own project to the public at the CMLC next weekend though, so I won’t be missing out on a great opportunity.
With only two weeks left I think we are all feeling the time crunch to finish collecting our data and start getting everything set to go on our posters. My plan for the next week is to go through all the pictures of the larvae I have captured so far and measure them all. When I measure then I will be getting numbers for their postoral arm length, midline body length, stomach diameter, and most importantly pigment coverage in the arms of the larvae. That’s all the news I have for this week, until next time! This weekend we got out of Charleston for a bit and drove down to a Wildlife Game Park in Bandon, Oregon. A couple of us (Annika, Chloe, Sherlyn, Sebastian, and I) enjoyed our Sunday by petting goats, capybaras, deer, and other animals. Chloe and I even had a chance to meet a handsome Serval named Sonic. It was nice to get away for the day and spend some time around vertebrates, as most of us spend our days working with invertebrates. I was hoping to catch a glimpse at some ring-tailed lemurs, but they were nowhere to be seen. I don’t believe they escaped their enclosure…so they must have been hiding out or sleeping in an area blocked off from public view. The rest of the week passed by quickly. I fertilized sand dollar eggs early Monday, and once Tuesday came alone they were ready to be put into their treatment beakers. I set them up in my sea table outside and they will stay there for a week. During all of that set up I managed to get a start on my project poster, so far I only have a rough outline of how the poster will look, but it is a start.
This Tuesday we all went to the CMLC (Charleston Marine Life Center) to learn about communicating our science to the general public. It was not something I previously thought about, and it’s something I am grateful to have learned. Science is fun and exciting, but not everyone feels the same, and not everyone has a deep understanding of it either. I think it was a great way to get us thinking about how to make others excited about the wonders of what we discover. To help us practice this skill each of us will be preparing a small display at the CMLC regarding our research project of the summer. During our time there we will introduce our project to visitors of the CMLC and make the material digestible and fun for people of all ages. There's not many weeks left here and it's a little nerve-wracking thinking about everything that still has to be done for my project. I know in the end it will turn out fine, but it's hard not to think about it all when the weeks are passing by so quickly. It's crazy to think that more than a month ago I was just arriving here at OIMB. I'm still the same person I was before, except now I have new experiences and new skills under my belt and I'll always be thankful for that. Welcome to week 5! It's been quite a week. Last Friday Nicole and Erin (another PhD student) took some of us tide pooling which was nothing short of amazing. It's so fun exploring this coast, and I hope that we can all go tide pooling again sometime. While tide pooling Annika and I ran into a little trouble with a seagull. As we tried to make our way around a rocky area we noticed a group of seagulls that seemed to be hanging around. Now, seagulls and I aren't compatible, we have an unspoken pact that we stay away from each other whenever possible. This particular day I broke that pact by getting quite close to them and the seagulls did not appreciate that and were squaking loudly to voice their displeasure. Annika and I thought nothing of it until we had one particular seagull swooping down right above our heads and we were terrified of being attacked, safe to say we turned back to avoid that fate. I'm sure it was quite a sight to see, but I'm very hopeful that no one saw our struggle. It’s important to note that these seagulls are known to nest in that area, making us intruders. They were simply protecting their young, and they did a great job at that. After our run in with the seagull, the rest of the weekend went by really quick and soon it was time for us to give our project presentations. I was quite nervous, but once I finished I was really happy. I felt that I was able to get my ideas across in a somewhat clear manner. It was also cool to learn about the projects that the other interns are working on. Because we work in different labs this was a great opportunity to get up to date on what everyone is doing. The rest of my week was spent hand counting and placing 50 individual sand dollar larvae into each of 12 beakers - that took quite some time. Along with counting I've been teaching myself how to use Photoshop and ImageJ (an image analysis program) to look at pigment cells inside larvae. I made a breakthrough on Thursday with Photoshop, I was finally able to isolate the pigment cells and allow ImageJ to see them accurately. That was an amazing feeling once I finally was able to get an image that I could work with. I still have a lot of work left to do, and this is only the beginning but I'm very proud of myself in this process so far.
I'll be back to update you all next week! We all had to turn in our project proposals this week. I was really nervous about it as I never had to write a proposal before, but with some help from Nicole (a brilliant PhD student in Dr. Richard Emlet’s lab) and peer revision from Annika, I think I ended with a finished product that I can be proud of for my first attempt. This week I have been busy assembling some necessary items for my project, a bubbler for beakers where my sand dollar larvae will live, a plexiglass sheet with circles cut into it to hold the beakers, and black spray painted beakers to keep light out. The bubbler is what gave me the most trouble, I could not get some of the air taps into the PVC pipe no matter how hard I tried, in the end I was able to get almost all of them threaded into the pipe (except for three, which my mentor helped thread in). The weekend boat trip was a blast! Except for the sea sickness…but despite that I had a wonderful time being out on the sea. As Chloe, Catalina and I were looking out to the horizon to manage our sea sickness we saw a small pod of dolphins! I wish I had captured a picture to share, but it was amazing to witness that nonetheless. Once we reached our destination out on the ocean (150-170 ft of water depth below us) we dragged a dredge along the bottom and pulled up an abundance of marine invertebrates, sea stars, nudibranchs, scallops, shrimp, decorator crabs, etc. We took some of them back with us in coolers that were set up in a sea table at the lab here, that way we have a chance to look at everything later. A couple of us (Annika, Chloe, Sherlyn and I) have started a movie night on the weekends. Either on Friday or Saturday night we all get together and choose an old movie we all used to love growing up to watch together. This past weekend we decided to watch She’s All That, and I am definitely looking forward to this weekend’s movie night (the movie we are watching has yet to be decided).
On Wednesday afternoon we attended a seminar presented by Dr. James Carlton and it was wildly informative. Dr. Carlton spoke about how Japan’s 2011 Tohoku earthquake led to animal invasions in different parts of the US (Oregon being one of them). It was not something that I ever imagined could make such a large impact on local ecosystems. Even more surprising was the fact that these invasions started to become apparent one year after the earthquake, and coastal species from Japan survived the long voyage (unexpectedly) to the pacific coast. This seminar was by far one of my favorites out of all the one’s we have attended here at OIMB. We are all almost halfway through this summer internship and I can’t be more grateful. In 4 short weeks I have learned how to; care for growing larvae, set up a sea table, and even drive a boat (special thanks to my mentor Richard for that experience). There is still more time for learning and fun I am going to take advantage of every moment I can. Cheers to the three-day weekend! The 4th of July weekend was filled with exciting activities. We had fun going to the beach and enjoyed the cold water during these past couple of warm summer days. Some of the other interns and I also had a chance to stop by the Charleston Marine Life Center (CMLC) right across from OIMB and look around. It was a great experience seeing the variety of sea animals on display there. We even got to watch the workers feed the wolf eel and the octopus they have: these were cool highlights. I highly recommend the CMLC to anyone visiting Charleston looking for a fun way to spend a couple of hours. The beginning of the week was dedicated to going out in the field to collect sand dollars. With the help of two fellow intern’s (J’mie and Ytxzae) we went out on a boat to collect sand dollars. We pulled a small biological dredge across bottom at 45ft of water and after a couple of minutes pulled it up filled with sand dollars. After three drags we had collected more than enough sand dollars that I will use to spawn back in the lab for my project.
This weekend we are also going on another bigger boat trip with all of the interns here. Safe to say I will have been on a boat three times in the span of one week, which is more than I have gone in the past several years. Overall, I have been a little stressed trying to get a routine down for my research project as the weeks are passing by faster than I anticipated but it’s still early so I am sure that I will find my rhythm soon enough.
WEEK 2:
This past weekend was quick and also a lot of fun. All of us REU interns went on a camping trip together, we had a wonderful time enjoying the unusually warm beach day, and a nice 4 mile hike, which ended with us catching a small glimpse of a gray whale hanging around a bed of kelp in the ocean. At the start of this week my mentor, Dr. Richard Emlet, took me and my lab partner Annika out on a boat to go search for some sand dollars at low tide early in the morning. We found many sand dollars, but they were small and I am unsure if any of them will be able to release eggs to fertilize. The next morning we went out in search of purple sea urchin’s that we could possibly spawn. We went out to Sunset Bay and found an abundance of sea urchins of all different sizes. We checked the gonads (reproductive organs) of the urchins to see if they are capable of producing eggs. In the process I was able to try fresh sea urchin, despite my prior hesitation when seeing it at sushi restaurants. It wasn’t my favorite but next time I go to a sushi restaurant I don’t think I would hesitate to order it. I set up the sand dollars and sea urchins I collected into tanks with running sea water, they will be kept there until I am ready to spawn them. The project I mentioned I was working on last week has now evolved into something different. Instead of looking at swimming speeds of those larvae in low oxygen water, I will be trying to discover more information about pigment cells that first appear in larvae at early stages (More specifically, the gastrula stage). The roles of these cells is not fully known but it is thought that they have something to do with protection against UV light and may be a part of the immune system in echinoderms. My new project is trying to see if I can create more of these pigment cells by exposing them to UV light. I hypothesize that the UV light will cause larvae to create more of these pigment cells to protect themselves from UV damage. I predict that those grown in absence of UV light will have fewer pigment cells. To test if pigment cells play a role in immune system of echinoderms I will introduce the larvae to a strain of bacteria and see which group (those exposed to UV light and those not exposed) is able to better survive growing alongside bacteria. The project has been a work in progress and there are some aspects that still need to be worked out, for example how long I can expose these larvae to UV without causing serious damage. I have some ideas but I will not know if these times work until I test them out. A big hello to anyone reading this, my name is Victoria Cardenas, I am a 24 year old student currently attending Humboldt State University (now known as Cal Poly Humboldt). While I lived in a few different places growing up, California is the place I have called home for the longest. I have been tasked to write a short introduction describing who I am. While it is easy to share facts about my life and the things that I like or dislike, it doesn’t really give anyone a feel for who I truly am. So I’ll do my best to share things about myself that aren’t just likes or dislikes. I am very quiet and tend to be shy. But once I get comfortable I can talk for hours. Food is something I use to get close to others; I call myself a “social snacker”, which really just means I love to share snacks I have or food I make with others. It makes me happy to see others enjoy their food while we all eat together. Oh, and one last thing I truly believe that pineapple does not belong on pizza (or any cooked food for that matter), BUT it definitely belongs in some good Al pastor tacos. I am working in Richard Emlet’s lab this summer, and I am so grateful to be a part of this REU program. I have no doubt that it will give me the chance to explore what being a scientist entails, from coming up with a project, trial and errors in setting up the project, and seeing the project through until the end by giving a presentation. This is what I hope to take away from this program, and I’m sure along the way I’ll learn things that I was not expecting to. In just this first week I have had a great learning experience, I have learned how to view and identify larvae under a microscope (specifically barnacle larvae). In addition, I have had a wonderful time talking with everyone involved in this REU experience. I have a project in mind already, but science doesn’t always like to stick with plan A, in my case that’s what happened. I had planned to see how low oxygen levels affect swimming in larvae of Dendraster excentricus (or as it is commonly known: Eccentric sand dollar). But this week, I have been unable to collect eggs to fertilize from Dendraster excentricus. My mentor suggested trying again with another animal, and try I did, with Strongylocentrotus purpuratus (common name: Purple Sea Urchin) but I was also unsuccessful. Because of this I have to make another attempt to get eggs from urchins or sand dollars that we will collect from the field next week. Sand dollars or sea urchins, either will work out in the end. So in the mean time I am thinking about my experiment design and set up, as well as learning about the equipment I’ll need to use for my studies. That’s where I stand at the finish of this first week here at OIMB, and I’m hopeful that everything is going to work out in the end. -Microscope image of sand dollar larvae |
AuthorMy name is Victoria I am from Palmdale, CA but over my life I have moved around a lot and lived different places. I love to travel and explore, especially along the coast. I am a Zoology major studying at Cal Poly Humboldt and like to spend time reading about animal behavior. Archives
August 2022
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