Welcome to week 5! It's been quite a week. Last Friday Nicole and Erin (another PhD student) took some of us tide pooling which was nothing short of amazing. It's so fun exploring this coast, and I hope that we can all go tide pooling again sometime. While tide pooling Annika and I ran into a little trouble with a seagull. As we tried to make our way around a rocky area we noticed a group of seagulls that seemed to be hanging around. Now, seagulls and I aren't compatible, we have an unspoken pact that we stay away from each other whenever possible. This particular day I broke that pact by getting quite close to them and the seagulls did not appreciate that and were squaking loudly to voice their displeasure. Annika and I thought nothing of it until we had one particular seagull swooping down right above our heads and we were terrified of being attacked, safe to say we turned back to avoid that fate. I'm sure it was quite a sight to see, but I'm very hopeful that no one saw our struggle. It’s important to note that these seagulls are known to nest in that area, making us intruders. They were simply protecting their young, and they did a great job at that. After our run in with the seagull, the rest of the weekend went by really quick and soon it was time for us to give our project presentations. I was quite nervous, but once I finished I was really happy. I felt that I was able to get my ideas across in a somewhat clear manner. It was also cool to learn about the projects that the other interns are working on. Because we work in different labs this was a great opportunity to get up to date on what everyone is doing. The rest of my week was spent hand counting and placing 50 individual sand dollar larvae into each of 12 beakers - that took quite some time. Along with counting I've been teaching myself how to use Photoshop and ImageJ (an image analysis program) to look at pigment cells inside larvae. I made a breakthrough on Thursday with Photoshop, I was finally able to isolate the pigment cells and allow ImageJ to see them accurately. That was an amazing feeling once I finally was able to get an image that I could work with. I still have a lot of work left to do, and this is only the beginning but I'm very proud of myself in this process so far.
I'll be back to update you all next week!
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We all had to turn in our project proposals this week. I was really nervous about it as I never had to write a proposal before, but with some help from Nicole (a brilliant PhD student in Dr. Richard Emlet’s lab) and peer revision from Annika, I think I ended with a finished product that I can be proud of for my first attempt. This week I have been busy assembling some necessary items for my project, a bubbler for beakers where my sand dollar larvae will live, a plexiglass sheet with circles cut into it to hold the beakers, and black spray painted beakers to keep light out. The bubbler is what gave me the most trouble, I could not get some of the air taps into the PVC pipe no matter how hard I tried, in the end I was able to get almost all of them threaded into the pipe (except for three, which my mentor helped thread in). The weekend boat trip was a blast! Except for the sea sickness…but despite that I had a wonderful time being out on the sea. As Chloe, Catalina and I were looking out to the horizon to manage our sea sickness we saw a small pod of dolphins! I wish I had captured a picture to share, but it was amazing to witness that nonetheless. Once we reached our destination out on the ocean (150-170 ft of water depth below us) we dragged a dredge along the bottom and pulled up an abundance of marine invertebrates, sea stars, nudibranchs, scallops, shrimp, decorator crabs, etc. We took some of them back with us in coolers that were set up in a sea table at the lab here, that way we have a chance to look at everything later. A couple of us (Annika, Chloe, Sherlyn and I) have started a movie night on the weekends. Either on Friday or Saturday night we all get together and choose an old movie we all used to love growing up to watch together. This past weekend we decided to watch She’s All That, and I am definitely looking forward to this weekend’s movie night (the movie we are watching has yet to be decided).
On Wednesday afternoon we attended a seminar presented by Dr. James Carlton and it was wildly informative. Dr. Carlton spoke about how Japan’s 2011 Tohoku earthquake led to animal invasions in different parts of the US (Oregon being one of them). It was not something that I ever imagined could make such a large impact on local ecosystems. Even more surprising was the fact that these invasions started to become apparent one year after the earthquake, and coastal species from Japan survived the long voyage (unexpectedly) to the pacific coast. This seminar was by far one of my favorites out of all the one’s we have attended here at OIMB. We are all almost halfway through this summer internship and I can’t be more grateful. In 4 short weeks I have learned how to; care for growing larvae, set up a sea table, and even drive a boat (special thanks to my mentor Richard for that experience). There is still more time for learning and fun I am going to take advantage of every moment I can. Cheers to the three-day weekend! The 4th of July weekend was filled with exciting activities. We had fun going to the beach and enjoyed the cold water during these past couple of warm summer days. Some of the other interns and I also had a chance to stop by the Charleston Marine Life Center (CMLC) right across from OIMB and look around. It was a great experience seeing the variety of sea animals on display there. We even got to watch the workers feed the wolf eel and the octopus they have: these were cool highlights. I highly recommend the CMLC to anyone visiting Charleston looking for a fun way to spend a couple of hours. The beginning of the week was dedicated to going out in the field to collect sand dollars. With the help of two fellow intern’s (J’mie and Ytxzae) we went out on a boat to collect sand dollars. We pulled a small biological dredge across bottom at 45ft of water and after a couple of minutes pulled it up filled with sand dollars. After three drags we had collected more than enough sand dollars that I will use to spawn back in the lab for my project.
This weekend we are also going on another bigger boat trip with all of the interns here. Safe to say I will have been on a boat three times in the span of one week, which is more than I have gone in the past several years. Overall, I have been a little stressed trying to get a routine down for my research project as the weeks are passing by faster than I anticipated but it’s still early so I am sure that I will find my rhythm soon enough.
WEEK 2:
This past weekend was quick and also a lot of fun. All of us REU interns went on a camping trip together, we had a wonderful time enjoying the unusually warm beach day, and a nice 4 mile hike, which ended with us catching a small glimpse of a gray whale hanging around a bed of kelp in the ocean. At the start of this week my mentor, Dr. Richard Emlet, took me and my lab partner Annika out on a boat to go search for some sand dollars at low tide early in the morning. We found many sand dollars, but they were small and I am unsure if any of them will be able to release eggs to fertilize. The next morning we went out in search of purple sea urchin’s that we could possibly spawn. We went out to Sunset Bay and found an abundance of sea urchins of all different sizes. We checked the gonads (reproductive organs) of the urchins to see if they are capable of producing eggs. In the process I was able to try fresh sea urchin, despite my prior hesitation when seeing it at sushi restaurants. It wasn’t my favorite but next time I go to a sushi restaurant I don’t think I would hesitate to order it. I set up the sand dollars and sea urchins I collected into tanks with running sea water, they will be kept there until I am ready to spawn them. The project I mentioned I was working on last week has now evolved into something different. Instead of looking at swimming speeds of those larvae in low oxygen water, I will be trying to discover more information about pigment cells that first appear in larvae at early stages (More specifically, the gastrula stage). The roles of these cells is not fully known but it is thought that they have something to do with protection against UV light and may be a part of the immune system in echinoderms. My new project is trying to see if I can create more of these pigment cells by exposing them to UV light. I hypothesize that the UV light will cause larvae to create more of these pigment cells to protect themselves from UV damage. I predict that those grown in absence of UV light will have fewer pigment cells. To test if pigment cells play a role in immune system of echinoderms I will introduce the larvae to a strain of bacteria and see which group (those exposed to UV light and those not exposed) is able to better survive growing alongside bacteria. The project has been a work in progress and there are some aspects that still need to be worked out, for example how long I can expose these larvae to UV without causing serious damage. I have some ideas but I will not know if these times work until I test them out. |
AuthorMy name is Victoria I am from Palmdale, CA but over my life I have moved around a lot and lived different places. I love to travel and explore, especially along the coast. I am a Zoology major studying at Cal Poly Humboldt and like to spend time reading about animal behavior. Archives
August 2022
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