This past weekend was a nice bit of fun before getting into work this week as me and a few other REU interns went up to Portland for the weekend. We went to the International Rose Test Garden, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, at least 5 thrift stores, and had some really good food along the way. This week I also conducted more trials of the boundary experiments with the larvae to see if they would actually move to interact with the beads rather than just stopping right after colliding with them. After remaking slides and sitting in front of a computer for a couple of hours just watching the larvae, I was able to catch a couple instances of them actually swimming and encountering the beads!! The best instances were when the larvae would run into the bead and it would run along the edge of the larvae’s surface so I could observe how the skin cells fluorescing were primarily those that the bead was directly touching. I guess it just took messing around with the coverslip that goes over the slide; the larvae might have been a little too squished last time (but they could still swim so I’m not exactly sure if this is true).
This week George also showed me how to tether the larvae using a really small pipette that can grab and hold the larvae so we can expose them to different stimuli. I also took a plankton tow, which is where I use a really small net to catch small organisms in the water and took them back to the lab to use them in my experiments with the tethered larvae. I specifically wanted bivalve veligers, which look like little clams, as they swim really fast. We haven’t yet conducted trials with the tethered larvae and the fast-passing swimmers, but we always have next week!!
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