This week was full-on computer work. So far the majority of the work has been in the lab and field but now its time to wrap things up and get our data displayed on our scientific posters and in the identification cards. Trying to figure out the layout for the scientific poster without results in the beginning of week was a bit trying but I learned a lot on Tuesday during our critique session on the correct formatting, information to display and various other components that go into creating a scientific poster. Since the posters are 40x35(which is pretty large) I was surprised at how difficult it was to fit everything you might want on there.
Our results came in on Wednesday and its been great to see the summary of all the efforts of the past few months. In the end we processed 123 worms and had taken 4,899 photographs (over 20 gb of storage!) which included body, head shots and stylets. We obtained ninety-two DNA barcodes back to analyze. Some of our samples didn't go through due to fuzzy reads and two of the Maculaura magna came back as a polychaete and bivalve, which was most likely their last meal! Unfortunately we had really good photographs of those and now they can’t be included in the guide and the only Maculaura magna with a sequence to match is missing its tail! We do still have tissue samples left of them and some of the others that for one reason or another didn’t go through. So maybe in the future someone will re-run their DNA and include them in the guide. To find out how many different species we had collected, we compared the barcodes with the ones stored in the national database (BLAST) and a local database of sequenced worms previously known to be found here in Oregon. Altogether over the past two months we collected and have a complete set of information, including habitat, color photographs and DNA barcodes on 36 different species. Four of those species are likely to be new to science, two were not previously known to inhabit the Oregon coast and one was only previously known in its larval form.
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Rebecca OrrHi, my name is Rebecca I’m from Northern California. My major is in biological sciences. I am so excited to be working in Dr. Svetlana Maslakova’s lab and learning the protocol and procedures for completing a modern biodiversity survey. Archives
August 2021
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