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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