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!
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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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