Hello! I am Kaylee Wilkinson, so happy and honored to be here. First off I just gotta say, all the interns are wonderful and super friendly! I am getting super amped in hopes of a rockin’ experiment here at the “Exploration of Marine Biology on the Oregon Coast” program led by Maya Watts and Richard Emlet at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology. My heart is blooming like a marvelous feather duster coral whose awaited its first plankton all day long. You should know that I have almost too many hobbies - I write poetry, and slam. I am often ‘overly expressive’ with my choice of words, please, just go with it ! Also, I love playing jazz piano and singing, I also make wearable special FX art! (Visit merpeopletails.com to check out some of my work!) And on top of all of this I am both a professional mermaid, and aerial silks dancer. Beyond hobbies, my truest ambition is to be a marine biologist. These aspirations developed when I was very young. I was influenced by a lot of non-fiction books like Alien Ocean by Stefan Helmreich, Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and certain idols like Jane Goodall. I heard of the OIMB program through my advisor Melissa Kilgore. We toured the campus together a few months ago and I thought the campus was a beautiful, quiet place to focus on research. My lab partner Matt and I are planning to conduct several research experiments, all of which we are very excited to get going into full swing. This first week we sat down and had a casual discussion with our mentor, Dr. Craig Young on what he knows so far about deep sea larvae. We hope to better understand their feeding and reproductive habits. During our initial experiments we happened to have spawned a Strongylocentrotus fragilis (Fig. 1) i.e. the ‘fragile pink’ sea urchin, we proceeded to fertilize it (Fig 2.). This particular species of deep sea urchin has a larval development that has yet to be recorded. In fact little is known about the species at all, so the graduate students, Dr. Young, and ourselves are overwhelmingly excited to be conducting such research on our very first few days being here. In the Young lab, Matt and I work alongside a wonderful pair of graduate students, Lauren and Caitlin. They have been there every step of the way while we think our way through guided experiments, and record larval stages of deep sea urchins. We have been taking images of the entire developmental process with a compound microscope that has a camera attached for easy photography. We have also been working with a Flume device which we intend to use to compare the chemosensory of sea urchins. Our original research plans seem to be changing everyday this week after we successfully fertilized Strongylocentrotus fragilis. Now we have great plans of experimenting with early embryo and larval stages of the fragilis species under various pressure and temperature variations using machines designed by Craig Young himself with the assistance of a few engineers. The community here at OIMB has been especially welcoming and helpful so far, nothing but smiling faces and plenty of things happening, so there’s never a dull moment. Everyday there is a field trip of some sort rather it be between students or the labs, and they usually are very welcoming of others to tag along on their expeditions. I am eager to see what is next here at OIMB!
0 Comments
|
AuthorMy name is Kaylee Wilkinson, I am both a student, and am currently employed by Lane Community College in their wet lab for marine biology research. I serve as a coral husbandry assistant and tank-scape artist. I enjoy sciences where you can dive into the "unknown", being in Craig Young's lab is perfect for such interests. I am thankful for Dr. Young and his graduate students to have taken me in as an REU intern this summer, they have been very enjoyable to work with! Archives
August 2019
Categories |
Proudly powered by Weebly