It’s a wrap! Week 9 is now over, marking the end of my time and research here at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology. This week I presented my research poster to faculty and staff on campus. Looking back at the start of my initial research project and comparing it to my finished product, it has changed a lot and if that doesn’t perfectly describe research in a nutshell then I do not know what will! The end results of my research were not what I expected them to be. Based on my results, the adult crab had a different preference of food on day 1 and day 2. This could be since I starved the crabs for 5 days prior to starting the experiment so they were hungry and willing to eat everything on day 1. Even though it did not give me a specific answer to my question, it left me with more questions that I had not thought about. Questions like, what would happen if I did not starve the crabs prior to starting, or do results change with a different species of crabs, or do results change with a different type of food source such as tuna, salmon or even shrimp. If I were given an extra 9 weeks, I would try and answer these questions but my time here is over. OIMB has been nothing but a pleasure and honor to study at. It has influenced my career path for the better along with all the memories and friends that I made while staying here.
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Week 8
Week 8 is done which unfortunately means only one more week in Oregon! This week flew by so quick. It was initially planned to have my second experiment done in order to finish creating my poster presentation, but due to the lack of catching megalopae which is required to run the second experiment, I was unable to run the experiment. To start this experiment, I needed about 200 megalopae total with a light trap. The light trap is specifically designed to attract megalopae because they are positively phototaxis, meaning that they are attracted to light. Every day of this week, I went out to our local docks to catch megalopae but there weren’t any in the light trap. My mentor has been recording data from this light trap every day for the past several years and when I looked at the data, the number of megalopae around this time decreases to zero. This indicates that their spawning season is ending which is why they are no megalopae in the light trap. Unfortunately, this left me with data from only one experiment on my poster. This week the other interns and I presented our research poster with each other and gave each other critiques and compliments on it. An exciting part of this week was watching Alexa, a grad student in my lab, defend and pass her thesis. She presented her research on Goose neck barnacles regarding their nutritional value as food and their physical growth when given two different types of food. Her presentation was overall amazing and I learned so much from it! This week marked the end of one of my experiments. This experiment involved using adult Dungeness crabs, juvenile Dungeness crabs and mussels. Treatment one was one adult with ten juveniles; treatment two was one adult with 30grams of mussel; treatment three was one adult with ten juveniles and 30 grams of mussel and all treatments were being ran for three days. At the end of treatment one, the average number of juveniles that survived was 5 per replicate of the treatment. At the end of treatment two, the average weight of mussel that was left was zero for all five replicates of this treatment. At the end of treatment three, the average number of juveniles that survived were two per replicate and the average weight of mussel that was left was zero across all five replicates. The results from treatment three agree with my hypothesis, the adult crabs prefer to eat mussels instead of each other. The next experiment that I will be conducting consists of megalopa and juveniles and also contain three similar treatments to the previous treatment.
This past weekend I was able to visit the University of Oregon and the city of Eugene. This was easily my favorite field trip that I did this entire summer. The campus of the University of Oregon is really beautiful and exploring the city of Eugene gave me the feeling of wanting to "re-transfer" to the University of Oregon! Eugene is a city that I want to revisit in the future. |
AuthorMy name is Juan Flores and I am an intern in Alan Shanks’ lab. I am from a small city in the Los Angeles County, Pico Rivera, California. I will be transferring to the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Fall, pursuing a Bachelors in Biology. Archives
August 2018
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