This has been our last week here for the summer and we spent it finishing the guide, printing the guide, and presenting our posters. We have been extremely busy but it has been so exciting to see our work from the last nine weeks come together into our final products. We processed 120 individual worms and obtained DNA sequences for 92 individuals. We found 36 species in total, 22 of which were hoplonemerteans, and each received a card in the identification guide. We found four nemertean species that are new to science, two species that have not been found in Oregon before, and an adult individual of a species that has not been found in the adult form before. It has taken an immense amount of work to get this far, but it has been entirely worth it and I have learned so much in the process of making our identification guide.
I want to use the rest of my final blog post to thank everyone that helped make this one of the most amazing summers of my life. I have been genuinely happy here and am utterly grateful for this experience. Svetlana has been a truly amazing mentor and has taught me so much about nemerteans, marine biology, and science in general. I am so incredibly thankful to have spent my summer working in her lab and hope to follow in her footsteps to become a researcher one day. It has also been a privilege and a pleasure to work with Christina, the graduate student in our lab, who helped me work through the little kinks of research I did not see coming and readily welcomed me into the lab. Likewise, I have loved working with Frances Conable, an undergraduate in the lab, in a variety of situations throughout the summer. Additionally, Rebecca, my fellow lab mate, helped the many hours we spent in the lab fly by. Even the tedious and stressful aspects of worm dissection and photography were fun thanks to her. Although science may be perceived as dry and sterile, the people I worked with this summer have been integral in shaping my experience in research and contributed to it for the best. I want to thank Richard Emlet and Maya Wolf-Watts for running this wonderful REU program and helping us edit and revise our posters, as well as Nicole Nakata for acting as an impeccable REU den mother throughout the program. I also want to give a shout out to my fellow interns, who have been some of the nerdiest, funniest, and most enjoyable people I have ever met. My summer would not have been the same without them. Finally, I want to acknowledge my family and friends for their endless support, as well as my blog readers for learning about my work. After I leave OIMB, I will return to my home institution and continue pursuing biology to eventually attend graduate school and earn a PhD. This program has solidified my resolve to pursue a career in scientific research and has exposed me to marine biology, which has become a particularly interesting aspect of biology to me. I would not be surprised if I end up studying marine biology for the rest of my life; but whatever I do with my career, I know for sure that I will look back on my time here at OIMB fondly and as a fundamental step in my path to becoming a professional scientist.
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We finished all of the molecular work this week, it will be all computer work from here on out. We ran 109 PCRs (polymerase chain reactions that amplify DNA) and ended up sending 44 of them for sequencing. Now we can use these last sequences in our guide.
We have started to put the guide together and sneaking a peek of our final product has been really exciting for all of us. The guide will act like a flip book that a worm enthusiast could carry in their pocket when they are out in the field, with one double-sided page for each nemertean species. There are two aspects of the guide that set it apart from existing guides. The first is that each card has a large color photo of a specimen of that species, as existing guides contain only black and white photos or line drawings of individuals. The picture entirely takes up the front of each card. There will be information about the species range and habitat on the back, in addition to a picture of the central stylet for hoplonemerteans. The second crucial aspect of our guide is that species identifications are verified with DNA barcoding so that we know each photo in the guide actually belongs to the species it represents. This is why we have spent so much time and energy on the molecular side of the project and working with sequences on the computer. All of the interns will be presenting our research projects at a poster session held on the last day of the program, which is next week. As the more labor intensive parts of my project have quieted down, I have been spending a lot of time designing and making my poster so that it can easily be understood by someone who is potentially unfamiliar with nemerteans and biodiversity surveys. It is definitely a challenge to balance brevity and comprehensiveness when talking about my project. I also did not realize ahead of time how logistically difficult it is to fit everything I want to talk about onto a 1,400 square inch (which is a lot less than it sounds) poster. Waiting on the last of our results to complete the poster reminds me how close we are to the end of the program and how soon we will be leaving the field station, which is a little sad. However, I am excited to present the poster to people who are (hopefully) genuinely interested in what I worked on this summer at the poster session. Below is the species card (front and back) for Nipponnemertes bimaculata, one of my favorite ribbon worms. There is a genus of ribbon worms, called Carcinonemertes, that lives on crabs and eats their eggs. This type of worm is known to occur on species such as Dungeness crabs, an economically important species since they are fished for human consumption. This week, some female striped shore crabs came into our possession and we saw that they were brooding (carrying eggs on their bodies) so we decided to check the eggs for Carcinonemertes. Previously, Carcinonemertes has not been shown to occur on striped shore crabs, so we weren’t sure if we would find any. As I was pulling the eggs off the crab, I found a Carcinonemertes nestled among them. What is even more exciting is that the worm had eggs in it that she eventually released into the bowl in an egg mass (however, we probably won’t get baby worms from them since they weren’t fertilized). If our preliminary identification of the worm is confirmed by DNA barcoding (which we are currently working on), we will be able to say that Carcinonemertes occurs on striped shore crabs and improve our understanding of the role Carcinonemertes plays in the ecosystem and what crab species the genus interacts with. We never planned to sample crabs for worms while making our identification guide, but this was an opportunistic find that ended up being very exciting for us. We finished photographing and extracting DNA from the last of our worms this week. I feel immensely more comfortable with the entire process of documenting worms and using a variety of chemicals to extract DNA from them, when compared to my confidence levels during my first week here. It was very bittersweet to realize we will not be doing this again before the REU program ends. However, I also noticed how far I have come in the relatively short time I have been here, which will give me momentum as I continue pursuing a career in science. On a more random note, I fertilized some sea star eggs my first week here at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology. I decided to check on them this week and saw that one of the larvae has finally settled (moved out of the planktonic stage that swims around in the water and attached itself to the bowl it is in while looking like a sea star)! |
AuthorI am Jacob and am from Rancho Cucamonga, CA. I am a rising Junior at Pomona College in Claremont, CA who has never studied marine biology in school before but has always been interested in it. I am incredibly excited to spend the next two months working in Svetlana Maslakova’s lab studying Nemertean (ribbon worm) biodiversity through genetic analysis. Archives
August 2021
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