We start off our week with a chance to engage with the Charleston community by sharing our research with others at the Charleston Marine Life Center. Each lab had their own little booth around the aquarium and we were able to tell anyone interested what we were doing for our projects. The most fun part is that we were responsible for bringing anything we might want to engage our audience with. Kaylee and I created a couple diagrams to help us explain our ideas and brought one of our pressure vessels to let people see it in action. We had an amazing turnout, and many people found our projects very interesting. Many wanted to know more about us than our projects, but it was fun to figure out how to explain our research to people with various backgrounds. The stress of the summer ending is starting to build up as we are creating our posters while trying to collect data for the posters at the same time. Kaylee and I spent the first few days of the week trying to get all of the pressure and temperature data collected and analyzed. We were able to get both urchin species to spawn again which we did not think we were going to be able to do. We were able to run one more pressure experiment and ended up getting data that contradicted what we had gotten recently.
At the same time, I am trying to collect data from my two detritus experiments and have run into a few bumps in the road. None of them will ruin the project, but it just causes us to get a little more creative. The S. purpuratus larvae culture did not make it through the weekend so hopefully I do not need them again, which I should not. The behavioral study I set up last week is giving me the exact opposite results I expected, which is not a bad thing. With all of the surprises this week, we have been trying to not get distracted from our due date of the poster on Friday. I am happy with the contents of my poster so far, and I have gotten amazing feedback from my advisor and other students, but I will rushing to get all of my data in time.
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This past weekend was the official, unofficial “parent’s weekend” because several of the interns had parents come to visit. We arranged a tour of the OIMB campus for the parents, so they can see the labs and see what their kids are up to. The tour went very well, and all of the parents seemed very interested. After the tour, we spent a couple hours in OIMB’s marine life center to see the exhibits and we started to think about the displays we will be presenting the next weekend. After enjoying a nice relaxing weekend, it was time to start my busiest week yet. I have now practiced my methods, figured out the “perfect” experiment design, and I’m running out of time to run the experiment. I planned to have all of my experiments started and running smoothly by the end of the week. The first project I decided to conquer this week was to construct the behavior experiment. This experiment was not originally planned, and it could bring some interesting results. I started feeding some cultures of larvae detritus and starving another culture to see how much difference there was. After a few days, I noticed that the cultures with food (either phytoplankton or detritus) were staying to the bottom of the jars or dispersing evenly throughout the water column. At the same time, the larvae that were being starved were actually all swimming to the top. This suggests that they may be going up to where food should be since phytoplankton is found in the surface waters in the real world. To document that, Dr. Young and I got creative and I spent my week making a very interesting method of extracting water from different depths without disturbing the rest of the culture. It took me drilling insulin syringes into the sides of the jars with valves that I could open or close and be able to attach another syringe on the outside to pull out the water. This will let me see how many larvae are at each depth. My other experiment is to see how much of the detritus they are eating and to see if they are actually developing while eating it. To make sure I can prove they are eating it I have some wells with food but no larvae, some with larvae and no food, and then obviously some with larvae and food. Some have detritus as food and others have their normal phytoplankton as food. Having those other treatments will be able to show that they are eating the detritus and it’s not disintegrating and it will show they’re not just starving. I created a probably too complicated way of sorting them out and making sure they’re all being fed the right things but at least I know it will work! I will let the experiment run for two weeks, and if everything goes as planned, then we will have some serious data! This week we have also been working on our posters, our CMLC displays for Saturday, and getting our costumes ready for the invertebrate ball on Thursday.
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AuthorMy name is Matthew Mullins and I am from Birmingham, AL. I am currently a rising junior studying marine biology at the University of the Virgin Islands. I am working in Dr. Young’s lab and I’m looking forward to exploring the Oregon coast and getting some interesting research experience! Archives
August 2019
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