Upon reflecting on this experience, I have come to some conclusions about my time here that I am confident will stay with me throughout the rest of my academic career and beyond. For one, research is amazing. Before this, I had not had the opportunity to carry out my own self-directed research project, but I loved every moment of it despite encountering various setbacks and frustrations throughout the process. This was greatly validating for me. I have never considered any other career path besides becoming a marine biologist, so it was incredibly encouraging to know that I actually enjoy doing research. In addition, I have learned so much about what research entails as well as marine biology in general. This knowledge will undoubtedly prove invaluable as I move forward as a biology student and researcher. Finally, I have made connections that I suspect will last long beyond the end of this program. The first of these connections is to my mentor, Dr. Kelly Sutherland. Kelly was a great mentor; the perfect balance of allowing for self-direction and providing guidance when necessary. I think that Kelly is as excited about my project as I am and we have decided to move forward with writing a manuscript for publication, which is indescribably exciting! I have also made connections with some of the other faculty members here at OIMB. These faculty members, such as Dr. Richard Emlet and Dr. Maya Watts, challenged me and pushed me to do the best research project that I could possibly do and for that I am especially thankful. These connections to researchers in the marine biology field will prove to be useful in the future as I move into my professional career. Outside of research related connections, I have also developed friendships with the other REU interns that I hope will continue. All the people in my cohort are excellent people, scientists, and friends.
I spent this last week putting together a list of things that I needed to get done in preparation for writing a manuscript. Most of this involved contextualizing my results in the existing literature to provide a more complete picture of what my results mean. To accomplish this goal, I spent some time re-reading papers that I had found earlier in the summer and thinking about how my results further or counter the arguments made in those papers. I also did more research based on some open questions that were left at the end of my project. In addition to contextualization, I worked on creating some supplemental plots of how the ctenes change in terms of size and Reynolds number based on feathering. I’m also working on converting the mean density of my organisms to an approximate sinking speed using Stokes law. While I see the benefit in adding these supplements to my project, I still have some troubleshooting to do before I can go about completing them. There is still a fair amount of work to be done on my project, but I think it will be manageable and I will still be working on it throughout the coming months. I hope to have a first draft of my manuscript done by the time I return to school in September and hopefully a publication isn’t long off.
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We are quickly approaching the end of the program, which is unbelievable to me. My time here at OIMB has flown by. I suppose that’s what happens when one engages with something time consuming, enjoyable and fulfilling, such as research. I’d like to update you on what I have been doing over the past week to put the finishing touches on my project. We had a major deadline on Tuesday of this week as we had to have a draft of our poster to be critiqued by the rest of the cohort. As such, I spent much of the first two days of the week working on my poster. This was challenging for me because I had a lot of data to include in addition to the details of my project and context on Pleurobrachia. As a result, the first draft had too much going on and everything was small and hard to read when projected to full size. I got a lot of good feedback from Kelly and the rest of the REU cohort. Returning to the drawing board, I reduced the amount of words in my introduction, methods, and conclusion so that I could make my figures larger. I also reduced my figure captions to their most necessary components. Unfortunately, I had to remove a couple illustrative, contextual figures so that I could fit my nine plots at readable sizes. Overall, I think my poster turned out well and I am looking forward to the poster session next Wednesday. I spent the remainder of my time this week working on my gravity experiments that I talked about at length last week. As a reminder, I was trying to remove a sensory organ called the statocyst so that the comb plates would stop beating and I could record videos of the organisms sinking to get an idea of how fast they sink on average. I attempted to remove this organ using light suction from a micropipette to pull the organ from the jellyfish’s body. This technique was very difficult to use as the statocyst is a tiny part of an already tiny organism. I had a hard time removing the statocyst through micropipette suction alone. Therefore, I tried to augment the technique to improve the chances that I would remove, or at least destroy, the statocyst. My first thought was to use forceps to crush the statocyst, thus making it easier to remove with suction, or to pluck the statocyst directly from the organism. This didn’t work very well. I was reasonably confident that I destroyed the statocyst, but metachronal waves were still travelling down the comb rows. My final idea was to puncture the organism with the micropipette at the statocyst to ensure that it was destroyed. I did this by holding the organism in place with forceps and puncturing a small hole in the body at the statocyst with the tip of the micropipette. I then used forceps to remove any leftover bits of the statocyst. However, comb row activity was still occurring and I don’t understand why. At this point, I’m running low on organisms, don’t have much time, and don’t have any more ideas about how to get my gravity experiments to work. As a result, I think I’ll have to be okay with not having a sense of how fast Pleurobrachia sink. Kelly, my mentor, suggested that I calculate the density of the jellies that I had remaining and compare their average density to the density of seawater to have some idea of whether they would sink or float. I also found a paper that states that Pleurobrachia are negatively buoyant, which means they sink. I think these pieces of information will provide sufficient insight into how gravity, buoyancy, and drag affect Pleurobrachia swimming, even if I don’t have a way to quantify this effect.
This week involved trying to tie up a few loose ends to complete my project. One of these loose ends was an experiment to account for the effect of gravity on the swimming speed of Pleurobrachia. My intention was to get a general idea of how fast Pleruobrachia sink or float when they are anaesthetized. Knowing the average speed of sinking/floating would allow me to account for the combined effect of gravity, buoyancy and drag on the swimming speed measurements I made a couple weeks ago. However, this proved to be very difficult. My initial idea was to use magnesium chloride, which is a common anesthetic, and then take videos of the organisms sinking or floating. It turns out that magnesium chloride does not stop the comb plates from moving. This is because the comb plates are coordinated mechanically, not by the nervous system. Thus, the comb plates can still move even when magnesium chloride has inhibited nervous conduction. This caused a lot of problems for me. After exposing the organisms to magnesium chloride in a small dish, I noticed that there was some decrease in activity but metachronal waves still traveled down the comb rows as expected. This activity in the comb rows allowed the organisms to move around, especially when transferred to a larger tank where the concentration of magnesium was low compared to the volume. There were only a couple times that I observed sinking or floating with low comb row activity, but these periods were short and few and far between. The organisms also regained normal activity very quickly after being transferred to the tank so any measurements I was going to make had to be very fast. These problems culminated in me being unable to make measurements of the speed of sinking or floating using my original methods.
This was frustrating as my project was very close to complete but it seemed like I was hitting a lot of road blocks right before the finish line. My last idea was to excise the statocyst, which is a sensory organ that ultimately controls the transmission of metachronal waves down the comb rows. I planned to do this using a micropipette, which allows me to use light suction to remove the statocyst. However, I don’t have that many organisms in the lab right now, so I don’t have much margin for error. I decided to hold off on this aspect of my project until next week for a couple reasons. For one, we have a draft of our final poster due early next week so I ended up spending the last part of my week making figures and putting together my poster. In addition, we were required to do public outreach at the Charleston Marine Life Center on Thursday of this week and I wanted to have live animals in my exhibit. Hopefully, my gravity experiments will go better next week. It’s not critical that I include this part of my project, but it would be a nice compliment to the work that I have already done. |
AuthorMy name is Wyatt Heimbichner Goebel and I am a marine biology major at Western Washington University. I love biology, specifically marine mammal ecology and biomechanics. I’m always up for conversations about music, poetry, and weird biology facts. Archives
August 2018
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