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 :)
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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.
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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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