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.
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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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