Dear reader, If you have come along on this journey with me you will know that even though they are technically brainless, the jellyfish have continued to outsmart me all summer. The gorgon Medusa extracting her final revenge on me of all people. I have learned several important lessons over the weeks here. Firstly, write everything down! Note taking is essential to keeping an accurate record and invaluable for going back to understand what happened during an experiment. Secondly I did not imagine research could be such a roller coaster! The ups and downs, when something starts to work and then does not, then you seem on the edge of a break though again, can be tiring. Working all day long on a problem, day after day can also be a drain, especially when nothing you do seems to work. Experimental science requires a lot of persistence and troubleshooting. That’s what makes it so challenging and rewarding at the same time. This weekend we will be presenting our research to a general audience at the Charleston Marine Life Center. I am looking forward to this. When I went out jellyfishing today I had the aim to catch as many different species as possible. I caught at least 12 species and have prepared a wide dish with a few individuals of each. My goal is to have children look in the dish and try to see how many different kinds they can recognize. Some of the differences are quite subtle so it should make for a good observation game. I will also have eggs, planula, polyps and medusae to demonstrate the life cycle of Clytia gregaria, my main research species. And of course I will be showing the movies and images we have managed to capture of unilateral cell division in embryos. Ps I have recently finished a book about jellyfish called Spineless: The science of jellyfish and the art of growing a backbone by Juli Berwald. It is an entertaining account of one woman’s fascination with jellyfish and an impressive summary of current research on jellyfish worldwide.
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AuthorMy name is Philip Aspinall, and I am a student at Sierra College in Grass Valley, California. The first time I peered into a microscope and found an entire, complex, beautiful world below the visible, I was transfixed. I am thankful for George von Dassow and Svetlana Maslakova for allowing me to work in their lab, and to Geroge for his generosity with his time and for being my mentor this summer. Archives
August 2019
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