Sunny Sunday

Today everyone was really surprised because it wasn't foggy or windy all day! It felt like it was about 60 degrees, so we decided to walk into town today. It's a 3 mile walk, so it took a while, but we found some good souvenirs and salt water taffy. We had to be really careful walking through town because there is no shoulder on Highway 1 there. On the way back we stopped at the Spud Point Crab Company about a mile from our dorms and had clam chowder, which was amazing! We're all really close already, and it's been really awesome getting to know everyone. After we got back we wrote postcards and had dinner. After dinner we sat in the dining hall and told funny stories from college for almost two hours. There is this "fox boy" that goes to one of the intern's colleges, and he wears fox ears and a fox tail 24/7 and runs around campus with his face covered. That was pretty funny, and there were a bunch of other crazy stories too. Tomorrow's going to be a busy day for everyone, because we have our lab meetings to get permission from our research professors to proceed with our projects. I'll just finish writing some postcards tonight and read a little bit.

Experimental Design= pretty much complete

Today I was able to sleep in because we didn't have to collect anything else from the harbor. I walked to the lab with one of the other REU girls around 9:00 and got started sorting through some more ulva and looking for amphipods and isopods. After doing that for 2 hours I spent 2 hours reading papers and trying to finalize ideas for my project.

I also finalized my project idea with my mentor, and I will be comparing habitat preference of one large species of amphipod with the habitat preference of the most abundant isopod species. We went into a lot of detail, but the main idea is that we want to try to find out why the amphipod species is found predominantly in ulva and why the isopod species is found on the surface of eelgrass. There are three different sections of the experiment and we'll get started on the first one on Monday.

First of all, we will need to collect at least 100 more isopods. Nearly all of the amphipods are already living in algae from an experiment that no one has touched in over 6 months. I'm excited to plan out my experiment on paper later tonight. I think the most challenging part will be indentifying the animals as either male, female, or brooding female, as well as trying to find individuals from each species within certain size ranges for different parts of the project.

This weekend should be pretty chill- I'm planning on going out to help my roommate collect a certain species of crab in the intertidal zone tomorrow morning at 6:30, and then I'm going to go with my mentor and maybe a couple other REU students to an oil drilling protest somewhere in the harbor area. On Sunday morning I'll probaby go to the lab and change the water in my isopod and amphipod containers.

Amphipods are everywhere

Hey, today was basically just like yesterday- I collected some more mud and algae samples from the harbor and sorted through them in the lab (found another species!). The water was much colder today. After lunch we went out to the docks to scrape the organic matter off of plastic plates that were hanging down into the water. There were lots of colonial sea squirts and amphipods. We'll sort those samples tomorrow morning in the lab. While we were at the docks we also measured dissolved oxygen content and water temperature and took a water sample to test for chlorophyll levels (part of an ongoing study). Back at the lab I used plastic cuvettes in some machine to get readings for the chlorphyll levels from each site, and I recorded them in this cool waterproof notebook.

Ethics module 1 took place from 3-5 this afternoon. We watched a video on plagiarism and fabrication of data in science and then had a short discussion. Dinner was early, which everyone was thrilled about. I have been looking for amphipods for basically two days straight, so I thought I was seeing amphipods in my pot pie for a second! After dinner I read through another paper and wrote down some possible research questions. I'll discuss what I want to do for my project with my mentor tomorrow morning.

I went for a run around 8:00. I ran almost all the way through the town of Bodega, which was really nice. It was foggy, kind of dark, windy, and kind of cold. I had a nice view of the harbor from the top of a hill in the town, though. And I passed a skunk on the way back- nothing happened, though. I also saw a bunch of endangered white pelicans on the mud flats, which was cool.

Starting to Work

The last couple of days have been pretty busy. Yesterday I had a meeting with all of the grad students in my lab and the professor. His lab focuses mainly on the effects and consequences of species diversity, and many of his students are focusing on seagrass beds. There are 7 graduate students in the lab. Then I met with the professor and my mentor to dicuss my goals for the summer and go over the classes I took last school year (which were very basic).

I separated diatomaceous brown algae from eelgrass with my mentor for an hour and a half, which is involved in her current research. She sampled the seagrass beds at various depths and she wants to determine algal biomass by using a suction sytem and taking the dry weight of the algae.

All of the REU students had lunch together and went on a library tour and a lab tour. The librarian is hilarious- she's really knowledgeable about biology, but she talks way too much and our library info sesssion could have easily been cut in half. No one really cared, but it was just funny. The lab tour was really cool. There are so many tanks, animals, and study areas! Some of the animals we saw on our tour were lobsters, sea stars sea urchins, rock fish, midshipmen (type of fish), salmon, anemones, and abalones.

After the tour I read and summarized a research paper in the library and had an amazing tofu stirfry and carrot cake for dinner ( I'm always so hungry here by the end of the day!). I stayed in the cafeteria and read another paper while drinking 3 different kinds of tea.

Today I went out to the mud flats at 6:00 to collect some ampiphod, seagrass, and ulva samples. I was so happy that my waders didn't have any leaks in them! The water was cold, but the waders were pretty warm and we only went in up to our waists. We had to drag fine mesh nets through the seagrass to collect amphipods (as well as other small invertebrates). We also took samples of only seagrass, a mixture of seagrass and algae, and just algae at each site.

Back at the lab we meticulously sorted through all of our samples. First we put the contents of each bag into a big tub and washed all of the mud and other matter (including living organisms) into the water at the bottom. We poured the water through a sieve and had to distinguish the amphipods from isopods, worms, tiny shells, larval crabs, tiny brittle stars, and snails. We used special tweezers to remove the amphipods and place them in sea water in clear plastic cups. Once we had removed all of the amphipods we found from each sample, I had to look at each one under a microscope and sort them by species. Once I had them sorted, my mentor identified them and told me some key characteristics to look for in each species. We found 6 species of amphipods, which are the main species found in Bodega Harbor.

Finding the amphipods was really hard, since most of them are smaller than half of the diameter of a dime (that's the best comparison I can think of right now). Some of them are larger and some are smaller. The isopods could be really gross if they were large- the biggest one we found was about two inches long. It probably took us around six hours to do all of that. It was fun though, and now I have to start thinking about my research question. Well, I'm going to go back to the dorms now and run.