Last PostFinal Week: Goodbye Charleston Today is Friday which means that tomorrow we all leave back to our regular lives. Some of us will be going to the airport in the morning and then rest will drive back in their cars. All I can say about the summer is that I think this will go down as the best summer of my life so far and I had such a great experience meeting new friends and doing research with some of the smartest and coolest people I have met. I want to thank Avery, Lauren, and Caitlin for aiding me throughout the whole summer on my project and being amazing figures to look up to. I want to obviously thank Dr. Craig Young for allowing me to do such a great project and giving me the resources I needed to do the best I could have. Shout out to Flynn for being a great lab partner and always fitting in some laughs in the middle of our intense work day. I feel like I had a great time getting to know all the REU interns and we all had similar yet different experiences we are leaving with. I hope they all continue doing well in life and remember all the fun memories we shared throughout the 9 weeks here. The week went by slow which felt good because we leave tomorrow and it is very bitter sweet. I tried to take advantage of any opportunity to have fun and to learn. Going to UO main campus to work on TEM with the grad students and Flynn was a really fun time and I finally got to see Hayward Field !! The poster presentation is now over and I am very proud of my work and everyone elses. You can tell by just looking at their posters how much time and effort was put into their posters and how they basically became experts in their subject. I hope to keep in touch with everyone and all in all a great summer at OIMB! Time to kick back at Richards pot luck and share our last memory here on the Oregon Coast! I got asked today a few times “Whats next for you?” And I think whats next is that I will be attending a new University at UCSC and I will be embarking in a new journey and will be meeting tons of new people. I hope that this REU reflects well on my knowledge of marine sciences and helps be get more opportunities in the Earth Science department at UCSC.
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PosterThe week was spent finishing up imaging and working on my poster for the symposium next Friday! I felt pretty good about my poster and have spent full days dedicated to working on the outline and the format of the poster. I have messed around with slightly different formats and I think the one I landed on now works the best. I used Adobe Photoshop and ImageJ to crop and label my SEM images and add scale bars. This wasn't a hard task but it was pretty time consuming. We presented our posters to the other REU interns and Richard/Maya to receive critiques and ideas on how to better the poster. I took everything that was mentioned and tried to add it to the poster! I spent the ladder part of the week tweaking the images and making sure everything is symmetrical and flows. Thanks to the grad students and Flynn, I have people to bounce ideas off of and see what works and is better for the viewer. Slough field tripOn Thursday, Sebastian and Colleen invited me to a quick trip to their mentors house to collect a sediment core sample in the South Slough. An Earth Science professor from OSU came down and we walked from Shawns house down to the muddy area to get a sediment core sample to hopefully see a visual change in sediment from a tsunami that occurred in the 1700s. This could be seen in the core by a quick change in sediment texture and size. We took 100 cm sediment core and actually saw the change in sediment which indicated that there was a huge tsunami back in the 1700s. We then walked back to the house and took the core to the South Slough lab to freeze. WeekendOn Friday after dinner we had a little bonfire at OIMB beach with the UO students since it was most of their last night at OIMB for the summer. I feel like I have became good friends with most of them so it was fun to enjoy the open ocean and the beautiful sunset. We spend the rest of the night chatting in the dining hall until 12 am and shared fun memories and jokes. Saturday was quite fun since we had a crab boil with some South Slough interns at their house up the mountain. We had two 5 gallon buckets of green crabs filled up and spent about an hour cleaning and getting them ready for the boil. The stove at the house was not the strongest and took a while to get the water hot enough to put the crabs in. We added about half a bucket of crab, corn, potatoes, shrimp, and sausage. We finally decided that the crab was cooked and had a grand feast. The potatoes never really cooked but oh well. We enjoyed the night with some drinks and some singing while an intern played the guitar.
Last couple SEMsAS the week went on, I finished prepping my last couple samples and got them ready for SEM. I spent the las two lab days of the week working on SEM for about 6 hours each day. I got some good images and was able to collect enough variation for my project and for the CMLC presentation on the weekend. I ran into a small problem with the SEM machine because it would unfocus and focus while taking images so it was not usable. I had to take a few pictures of the same stubs many times just to get a fully focused one which wasted some time since it takes ~5 minutes to take one image. On Friday, I finished up taking images and organized them on the library computers. For next week I will work on the images on photoshop and get them ready for the poster. The CMLC presentation was a success and really fun. Flynn and I got together a bunch of stuff to show the community. We had Alvinaconcha shells, Ifremeria shells, a photo slide of the SEM images and of the Hydrothermal vents, and some actual Warens larvae that I put under a microscope for people to see. Weekend!After the CMLC presentation, Sebastian and Colleen had live European Green Crabs for their presentation. I asked if I could have them so I can cook them up. They gave me a bucket with about 8 crabs and I cooked them up in the Inverts dorm. I just boiled them in some spices and added them to a pot with a garlic lemon butter sauce. They ended up being pretty good and about 5 of us sat down and ate them together. Sunday was a nice relaxing day as I took it as a personal day to go hike and explore. I started the day by walking to Bastendorff beach at noon and read/sun bathed for an hour or so. I then walked over to the big jetty and sat down and listened to music. I noticed the beach with the train tunnel so I tried to go but the tide was too high. I saw a path that lead up the cliff and I ended up at the top of the cliff. I crawled through some bushes and found myself on the backside of some plot of land with some abandoned buildings. I continued by journey by following a dirt backroad that ended at a round about. I looked on google maps and saw that. I was near a main road and just had to bushwack through about 100 meters of thick forest. I ended up getting stuck in a Blackberry patch which sucked because they have a lot of thorns. I pushed through and finally found the road after some sketchy situations. I was relieved and went straight back to OIMB. I jumped in the water and enjoyed the sun while it was still out. Overall a fun experience but was pretty scary when I was deep in the thick woods with blackberry thorns all over me haha. Weekend TripOn Friday Flynn, Catalina, and I flew out of the North Bend airport to SFO and got there around 3:30 in the afternoon. Catalinas mom picked us up and took us to cool parts of San Fransisco that I have been meaning to go. We went straight to Haight street where we walked around and hit some cool little stores. After this we went to the Wharf and got some sourdough bread. Catalinas mom arranged tickets for a boat tour around the Golden Gate Bridge and around Alcatraz Island. We ended the night eating some dinner at a restaurant and drove to Cats house in Cupertino. Saturday was spent hitting coffee shops, bagel shops and boba shops. Us three bartended for Cats moms birthday party and finished off the night with a late night In n Out run! Road Trip!That Sunday, We drove back to OIMB which took us about 10 hours. It was nice driving up California since that was all uncharted territory for me. I was amazed to how dense the woods are in Northern California and beautiful the scenery is. We got to OIMB at about 8 PM and just showered and relaxed after a long day. SEMMy SEM images are coming along well and I have greatly increased my image taking skills. I have learned how to use the Black/Gain mode on the SEM which intensified the Blacks and creates a contrast between the larva and the golden stub. This makes it easier to visualize the cilia on the larva. I have been taking more and more images in order to create a developmental "timeline" of the different warens stages for my project poster. I have also gotten a decent start to the poster and I have an idea of how the layout will be along with my results. The weeks are going by fast and we only have ~10 more working lab days which is not a long time to finish everything up. Excited to see how my poster turns out and how I will present my information.
This upcoming Saturday we also present at the CMLC to high schoolers and the public. This would be fun because we will get the change to present out project to a broad range of people and hopefully present to people who are very interested. WorkThis week was very productive and I was able to do a good amount of SEM imaging done. On Monday I was able to gather samples from the glass vials with larvae from the cruise ship. I sampled about 15 larvae from the vials and then continued with the dehydration process in order to prepare them for SEM imaging. The whole process takes about 4 hours before you can start imaging them and sometimes it might take longer depending on how many larvae you have to mount onto the stubs because you have to be very careful and gentle. When I was taking images I was realizing that they were not coming out as clean and detailed as I would want and decided to mess around with the different settings that I have not touched. I messed around with the Gain and Black which increases the image contrast. After messing around with them for a bit I discovered a way to get the images super clear to where you can see the individual cilia on the Warens. I was super stoked after since all the images I took were very detailed. If only I had known about this earlier, all the images I took would be way better. Bellow I attached some images of how small the larvae that I am working on are. On the white paper there are some larvae that are very hard to see but when looking at the platform under the microscope they are easier to see. I also put a picture of the OIMB campus on Wednesday when it was very gloomy and foggy. You could see how the trees are fading out of sight in the background. This is a picture I took from my dorm. Here is a little clip of four river otters taking a stroll on the OIMB beach. After a long day Flynn, Cat and I went over to the beach and talk and chill. As we were leaving we noticed some river otters playing on the beach and then they went back into the water and swam up stream. This is the second time in my life seeing otters in the wild and it was super cool. Today is Thursday and we are winding down from a busy week. The past couple weekends, the UO students and the REU students have been playing volleyball but today after dinner some students are going to play a soccer game. I believe we're going to go to Bastendorff Beach up the road to get a good spacious game going. Pretty excited for that and will enjoy the afternoon. I might jump in since the ocean in right there. SF Trip!So in my last blog I mentioned that I was going to Eugene for the weekend and maybe try and get tickets for World Champs. Plans did not go through but new plans arose. I will be going to the Bay Area this weekend with Flynn and Catalina to join Cat for her moms birthday celebration. We will be flying into SFO Friday afternoon and spend the day in sf and then go to Catalinas town, Sunnyvale. On Sunday, the three of us will drive back in Catalinas car so thats going to be supper fun. I have not visited San Fransisco and I was going to go when I live in Santa Cruz since its pretty close but this seems like an opportunity that I could not miss. Excited to eat In n Out (my favorite fast food spot).
Phone Update: I now have my phone back :) LARVAEThis week I worked on the Ifremeria larvae! early in the week, I spent a whole day transporting thousands of larvae from preservation baskets into smaller ones and prepping them for ethanol dehydration. The larvae I was working with last week were huge compared to the Ifremeria larvae that I was working on and will continue to work on. I first transferred two different vials which took me a while because there were quite literally hundreds of larvae that are very hard to see with the naked eye. In the image above, I was using a glass pipette and a dissecting microscope to get each and last individual larvae. In my right hand you can see the stick with a cactus spine on the end. This is actually a very efficient way of picking up the larvae because when they are that small, they kind of stick to the spine through static. I after setting up the larvae, an ethanol dehydration process was done for 15 minutes in 85%,90%,95%,100%,100%, and a third 100% percent to ensure all water was replaced. Avery ( a Masters student) and I did the critical point drying process together so I can fully understand it and be able to do it on my own next time. I then took about 40 images of the embryos that I stubbed and gold coated under the SEM. The week went by super fast and before I knew it, it was Friday. Friday morning a few of us went to the island near Sunset Bay Beach since it was a super low tide. The tide was a -2.5 feet which meant we could tide pool in area that normally would be underwater. We walked around and looked at many animals. I even cracked open an Urchin and ate its gonads. It was the first time I had Urchin and I thought it was pretty good. My favorite part was walking through the cave in the middle of the island which allowed us to get to the other side. Weekend!This weekend was a fun and productive! After lab on Friday, a few of us played some volleyball which was super fun except when the ball would fall into the river stream running through campus. I think in the hour we played, it made it into the stream 6 times. Saturday morning I went surfing with Aaron Galloway to Bastendorff beach. When we got there, the fog was so thick that we could not see the waves until you were basically ankle deep in the water. Aaron gave me a thick wetsuit, a cap, and booties in order to stay warm the water. We went out and the waves were actually pretty big. I would say they were 4-6 feet. The current was super strong so before you knew it you were 100 meters down the beach and had to get out and walk back up the beach. I only caught one wave since the ocean is very different from calmer Santa Barbara ocean. I will definitely try and go out more and get used to the break.
That same day, Cat, Flynn and I went to town for a grocery run and to eat sushi. Sunday seems like it will be a chill day where I work on my presentation and do some laundry. Phone update: My phone was shipped and will arrive here on Thursday! Also an opportunity arose where I might be able to to Eugene Fri-Sun and if I do I can go to World Champs on Saturday but I have to figure out where Im going to sleep. I wouldn't mind staying in Motel 6 as I would only use it to sleep. Ill figure it out soon. Working with LarvaeThis week we really got working on some Larvae collected from the TN401 cruise the graduate students took a couple months ago. Prior to working on the larvae that my project will be about, I needed some practice working with small larvae. We did a complete dehydration process followed by critical point drying. The dehydration process consisted of placing the larvae into small baskets and dropping them into different Ethanol concentrations until we reach 100% Ethanol. The larvae were already fixed and stored in 70% so I just had to place them into 85%, 90%, 95%, and three sets of 100%. This ensured that all the water and moisture was replaced by ethanol. The critical point drying process consist of placing them into a machine and purging them with pure Carbon Dioxide (CO2) until they are completely dry. Setting them up on stubs and sputter coating them are the final step before taking images on the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). When I started working with the larvae, I was a bit insecure about working with such small organisms but after a while, I got the hang of it. I ended up setting up five stubs with 5 different larvae from the deep sea cruise. Since the larvae were so small, the easiest way to place them onto the stub was by using the prick of a cactus taped onto a stick. This was actually a very efficient method for placing larvae. Collecting Sand dollarsOn Tuesday, Victoria, Dr. Emlet , J'mie, and I went on the smaller boat out to the open ocean to collect some sand dollars for Victorias project. We met up at the CMLC at 8 am and got the equipment ready. The four of us went out of the bay and Dr. Emlet conned the boat maybe a mile North to a marker on the boats GPS system that is known for having many sand dollar beds. We released a net that would drag on the floor of the ocean as the boat moved very slow. Doing this, we collected ~100 sand dollars which was way more than enough for Victorias project. We then went back to the bay and continued the day. I mainly helped pulling back the sand dollar trap back from the sea floor which was ~50 feet. Halfway through the week, I ended up loosing my phone in a spot where I know where it is but I physically can not get to it. Flynn, Catalina, and I were on the Jetty near the marina when my phone fell out of my pocket and fell into the depths of the rocks. At first I did not realize how serious it was and I thought I could just go look for it but after a few hours of trying I stopped. We heard the phone hit a few rocks on the way down but the spaces between the rocks are so small that I could not fit through. We tried to ping it on Find My iPhone but it didn't even show up on there which probably means that it was destroyed from the impact and the water. Oh well. I will try and get a phone by the weekend! Ive actually noticed that I have been more productive without a phone haha. Because of this, my blog this week is lacking some images but I will try and take some more soon. The week ended off with a fun boat trip with Dr. Richard Emlet where we went ~5 miles off coast from Cape Arago to dredge some organisms from the bottom of the ocean. The morning was a little cloudy and cold but the clouds soon cleared up and it turned into a great sunny day. Dr. Emlet sent the dredge down ~ 150 feet down and when we brought it up, we saw a bunch of animals. We got to see some Sea Cucumbers, Bristle Stars, Brachiopods, Corals, Sponges, Shrimp, and even a juvenile squid. We picked out some of the best looking ones and put them into buckets which were then placed into a water table near the Emlet Lab. I really enjoyed the morning and talked to the boat captain Newt for a bit. He was talking about how he has been working in the ocean for over 40 years and a few stories of being on a vessel in the midst of a huge off shore storm.
I have been greatly enjoying my time at OIMB and excited for the next couple of weeks to get my project started and being able to focus on the science! Today is Friday which means the second week of the REU is going to be over and we are getting ready for a nice 3 day weekend to celebrate the 4th of July. This week was really fun and I think it was also a very productive week in terms of our research projects and learning scientific skills. Within the week, the Young Lab graduate students helped Flynn and I learn new skills like using the SEM completely on our own and we also learned how to use the Sputter Coater to gold coat our samples which we have been taking images on. The sputter coater machine coats the samples with an atom thick layer which is used as an electron conductor. We have been taking images of the Alivaconcha shells which will tell us more about the species and the differences between them. On top of learning how to use the SEM, we have also been leaning how to set up the process for Histology and using the Ultramicrotome in order to look at Gastropod larvae sexual reproductive organs. Learning how to slice the resin molds with the Ultramicrotome was a cool process because we were slicing at 300um. At first I could not understand how thin that was but to give an example, a piece of hair is ~1000um wide. When slicing with the glass knife, it is almost impossible to see a single slice with the naked eye and a compound microscope is required to visualize the slices. After having a discussion with the Young grad students, we finalized our summer projects and now I know that mine will be aimed more towards imaging a larval stage of the Ifremeria nautilei known as the Warens larvae. By the end of the summer, my project should consist on exploratory SEM imaging on a larval stage that has not been fully examined and more specifically on how the gastropod broods differently from other non deep sea species. Trees!Prior to coming to OIMB, the only forest ive really been to would be the forest in Santa Cruz CA. Seeing the Oregon Coast was something super that has been on my bucket list and coming to OIMB was a perfect opportunity. I really enjoy climbing trees so I took advantage of any tree that looks climbable. On these pictures above, The first tree is a tree I climbed on our camping trip to Sunset Bay. I could have gone really high up but I decided to stay low and not end the camping trip early hehe. The big tree that I am hugging was from a little spontaneous drive up to Newport OR with Craig. We stopped at a little parking lot and I saw this huge trunk. The other tree is from the same day at Ona Beach parking lot. On my way down the tree I kind of slipped and hit my head on a tree next to it which Flynn and Craig both saw. I would say the highlight of the week was going on a little road trip to Newport with Craig and Flynn to recover a part for the OIMB rover that broke. We met up with a OSU professor who was going to let us borrow the part that was broken from the same rover. The drive was so beautiful and was filled with super cool scenery that I am not used to. This was also a perfect time for the three of us to bond and get to know each other on a more personal level. When we met up and got the part, Craig took Flynn and I to the OSU Hatfield Marine Science Center just to drive around and look at the campus. Although their marine lab has more "modern" buildings, I still think that the OIMB campus is better. On our way back down, we stopped at an A&W restaurant which I have never been to before. Tide poolingWoke up early on Friday since we were going to go tide pooling right after breakfast. We ate quick, got some boots, and hopped in the van. Nichole drove us to South Cove where we walked down some steep switchbacks and got to the beach. The tide was low enough to walk out and see some cool intertidal organisms. The picture on the left is me holding a huge Gumboot Chiton. On the right is a big Purple Sea Urchin bed with some red urchins and Green Anemone. I stayed dry for most of the morning and right before leaving, I accidentally stepped in some water that looked shallow and got my entire right foot soaked. I tried looking for some petrified wood or fossils on the cove but I was unsuccessful.
We are approaching the end of the first week at OIMB and all I can say is that I can tell I am going to have a fun summer here in Charleston OR. The first day happened to be a holiday which caused us to have the day off and enjoy the area and relax before a very productive week. I feel like most of the interns and I have already established some bonds and I can feel us getting really close by the end of the summer. I walked over to Bastendroff Beach and enjoyed watching the waves crash. The tide was low and i felt like the beach was super wide compared to Santa Barbara beaches. On our potluck at Sunset Bay, I ventured to the side of the cliff and noticed that there was a really thick layer of Sandstone which had tons of fossils exposed. I collected a few and took pictures of some that I could not pull out of the rock. I was amazed since I have not seen fossils poking out of the cliff like that. Here I added some pictures of the first week! The first picture is me after eating a huge lunch wanting to take a nap but having to get up and continue the day. On Thursday the Young PhD students took us to the CMLC and explored the exhibits and the live animals for a bit. I took a picture of a Fossilized Scallop with hopes that I would find my own somewhere around the Charleston area. The last slide is a picture of this cool looking tree that I see everyday when I play basketball outside the Birds and Mammals building. Ive never seen a tree like this before and it almost reminded me of a huge succulent. My research this summer will be focusing on the embryology and larval forms of two specific deep-sea Gastropods. The two specimen that we will be focusing on will be the Ifremeria nautilei and the Alviniconcha which live in hydrothermal vent environments. Within the lab, we will be setting larvae into Spurr's resin and using the Ultramicrotome to thinly slice the larvae and take usable samples of each larval form. As seen on the image above, we will be plating the samples with gold and using a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) to take detailed images of the specific organisms. My research project this summer will be focusing on the differences between the shell morphology between samples collected on a cruise off the coast of Tonga by Young Lab.
Also super excited to go camping today and spend the weekend exploring the coast of Sunset Bay area. I will try and body surf if the waves are big enough! |
AuthorHello I am Ytxzae Enriquez I am originally from Las Vegas, NV but have been living in Santa Barbara for a while. I just graduated from SBCC with two AAs in Biology. By the end of my career at Santa Barbara City College (SBCC) I really got into the Earth Sciences and I will transfer to University of California: Santa Cruz (UCSC) this Fall as an Earth Science/Ocean Science B.S Major. I really enjoy Surfing, Rock Climbing, Skateboarding, and going on super sick hikes. Archives
August 2022
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