Week five has come and gone and we are officially over halfway through the REU. I’m convinced time is thinner on the Oregon coast because it’s so easy to slip through three days and not even realize it until you’ve checked your calendar. This week brought some unexpected twists and turns. First of all, I finished my kelp density estimates for all fifteen videos and created a couple figures to model my results. At the first two sites in Haida Gwaii there were a range of 1.3-1.5 kelp stipes per square meter. At the third site there were closer to 2 stipes per square meter. And there were 0 stipes at the final two sites. Zero as in, I watched all four videos the prescribed three times and not a single stipe appeared in frame the entire time. I wasn’t sure what to make of this result but Dr. Galloway seemed excited by this revelation! Speaking of Dr. Galloway, he very generously offered to let me help with a project in the lab this week. He needed to collect some data on the calories present in red sea urchin gonads (reproductive organs) and set about doing so mid-week. With the help of another grad student, we created a makeshift assembly line in which I would record the dimensions of each whole urchin, Dr. Galloway would crack the urchin open and dissect out a gonad, I would record the wet mass of the gonad, and then a sample of a different gonad would be stored for testing. We harvested thirteen gonads in total and put them in the drying oven for 48 hours before I went back to collect them and record the dry mass of the gonads. The alternate samples were put in a freeze dryer and then ground up and compacted into pellets to use for analysis in the bomb calorimeter. A bomb calorimeter is, in a word, sorcery. Well no, it’s actually an instrument in which you can put a dry sample of some substance into a metal capsule (the bomb), pressurize the capsule with 100% oxygen, combust the sample until it is entirely consumed, and then derive how many calories the sample contained from the energy released by the combustion. Also, they don’t tell you this in the manual, but you can only use the calorimeter during a full moon, you have to sacrifice a lock of your hair into the bomb, and you have to perform some sort of pagan-sounding chant before you turn it on or else it won’t work. Anyway, the urchin project was both an extremely fun and informative side-quest this week and I’m so glad I was able to participate! I think I’ll spend the next week planning my poster and working on a new set of kelp videos. See you then!
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AuthorHello! My name is Catalina, welcome to my blog! I am a rising Junior at NYU pursuing a degree in Biology and I'm from Sunnyvale, California. This summer I am working in Dr. Aaron Galloway's Coastal Trophic Ecology (CTE) lab developing video survey methodology applied to kelp forest monitoring. Thanks for reading! Archives
August 2022
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