Hey, I know it's been a while since my last post. The time I've spent here so far has flown by, and there are only two weeks left after this one! There is so much to do- I spent a lot of time working on my poster this week. They are due on Monday so they can be printed on large paper, and we are presenting them to the faculty and the public next Friday. I want to finish mine by the end of today. I only need to take a few more pictures and add them to the poster.
I also need to start writing my results. I have edited my introduction a couple times already, but I feel like I need to do a lot of work on my paper soon! Along with writing, I need to take down the growth trial next week and analyze the results. Then I need to run the habitat trial for 2 days too. I have everything ready to go for that trial (for the most part), so I'll be ready to start that on Monday. I have to go down to the beach and haul a bunch of buckets of sand back to the lab to use in the habitat trial, though. That will probably take a while. I am hoping I have enough amphipods and isopods to run the trial so I don't have to go out collecting again.
Last Tuesday we were able to take a cruise on the lab's research vessel. We went out of the habor and along the coast. On our way back into the harbor there was a juvenile gray whale 50 feet from the boat and we saw it surface about 6 times. I took some good videos with my camera.
I should also think about preparing my Powerpoint presentation for the talk we have to do near the end of the program. I am really nervous for that, and I feel like I need to review the primary literature big time so I actually sound like I know what I'm talking about. I don't retain things well after reading them once, so it will take me a while to go over all of the papers I have looked at.
This weekend Aunt Tracy is coming and we are going to go to her friend's house near San Francisco and stay overnight tonight. This weekend should be a lot of fun, but first I need to squeeze in a progressive long run in about an hour. I'm also hoping to take the bus to Sebastopol on Sunday so I can do the 150, 70, and 120m repeats on an actual track.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Never been this tired in my life
This week started off really relaxed, but then picked up a bit. I didn't really have much to do except revise methods and work on my intro a little bit- wasn't feeling very motivated, so I'll have to get a lot of work done on that tomorrow. I sorted out some amphipods from the ulva tank on the back deck, and I have more than enough for my feeding trial. On Friday I was up at 4:50 am to go collect isopods. Luckily another one of the REUs wanted to come help, so that was nice. We didn't get all we needed (many were too big) though.
I wanted to sleep in on Saturday because when I don't have to go into the field I keep waking up around 6:20 for no reason, but my roommate had to go out, so the alarm woke me up at 6:00. On Saturday three of the other REUs and I drove into Sebastopol with the REU director. We walked around and shopped for about 4 hours while she ran some errands. I was really surprised by how many cool shops there were! There was a really awesome used book store (i resisted the urge to buy anything, though) and another regular bookstore. I bought a book with some bracelet patterns at a craft store, and then we walked around Whole Foods, which was cool. Sebastopol is pretty much a rich-hippie town (good people watching). The highlight of the trip for me was the record shop- they had EVERYTHING at great prices and in good condition. I didn't buy anything there because I was worried about records breaking in my suitcase, but i may have to go back. They even had an original Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band tour jacket! The video store in Sebastopol was hilarious because the employees make home videos and rent them out for free, just like the movie "Be Kind, Rewind" with Jack Black. They had a great selection with lots of documentaries and some used DVDs on sale for 6 dollars. We went to the legendary ice cream shop "Screamin' Mimi's" before we left. I had lemon poppyseed ice cream in a waffle cone, and it was amazing.
Today I woke up at 5:30 to go seining in the Harbor and pick up some more isopods. The grad student we were seining with is studying the different species of rock fish in the harbor (copper, yellow tail, etc.), but we saw lots of other species and I learned to identify a bunch of fish. We sae a pipefish, which was pretty insane. I also found a species of isopod that we had never seen before. It was dark red and white and it was the same genus as the ones I am working with not (Idotea). We went to two different sites and seined right along the eelgrass beds. Two of us would drag the net and then bring it back and dump it into a big cooler filled with seawater, and then we sould all drag nets through and sort the fish by species. We released the larger ones and kept only 3 species of rockfish and one species of perch.
The plan for next week is to go out and collect the rest of my isopods tomorrow morning, change water and food for the growth trial, run the feeding trial for two days (will involve weighing a bunch of algae and eelgrass), writing a first draft of my intro and preliminary results, and watching "The Birds" on the big screen in the lecture hall. Busy! Right now I need to go do my long run (waited until now because I took a 3 hour nap today) and get some sleep.
I wanted to sleep in on Saturday because when I don't have to go into the field I keep waking up around 6:20 for no reason, but my roommate had to go out, so the alarm woke me up at 6:00. On Saturday three of the other REUs and I drove into Sebastopol with the REU director. We walked around and shopped for about 4 hours while she ran some errands. I was really surprised by how many cool shops there were! There was a really awesome used book store (i resisted the urge to buy anything, though) and another regular bookstore. I bought a book with some bracelet patterns at a craft store, and then we walked around Whole Foods, which was cool. Sebastopol is pretty much a rich-hippie town (good people watching). The highlight of the trip for me was the record shop- they had EVERYTHING at great prices and in good condition. I didn't buy anything there because I was worried about records breaking in my suitcase, but i may have to go back. They even had an original Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band tour jacket! The video store in Sebastopol was hilarious because the employees make home videos and rent them out for free, just like the movie "Be Kind, Rewind" with Jack Black. They had a great selection with lots of documentaries and some used DVDs on sale for 6 dollars. We went to the legendary ice cream shop "Screamin' Mimi's" before we left. I had lemon poppyseed ice cream in a waffle cone, and it was amazing.
Today I woke up at 5:30 to go seining in the Harbor and pick up some more isopods. The grad student we were seining with is studying the different species of rock fish in the harbor (copper, yellow tail, etc.), but we saw lots of other species and I learned to identify a bunch of fish. We sae a pipefish, which was pretty insane. I also found a species of isopod that we had never seen before. It was dark red and white and it was the same genus as the ones I am working with not (Idotea). We went to two different sites and seined right along the eelgrass beds. Two of us would drag the net and then bring it back and dump it into a big cooler filled with seawater, and then we sould all drag nets through and sort the fish by species. We released the larger ones and kept only 3 species of rockfish and one species of perch.
The plan for next week is to go out and collect the rest of my isopods tomorrow morning, change water and food for the growth trial, run the feeding trial for two days (will involve weighing a bunch of algae and eelgrass), writing a first draft of my intro and preliminary results, and watching "The Birds" on the big screen in the lecture hall. Busy! Right now I need to go do my long run (waited until now because I took a 3 hour nap today) and get some sleep.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Week 3
Well, the first part of my experiment (the growth trial) has been running for 4 days now, and everything's going great. I have to change the water every day, which takes like an hour each time, but I just listen to music while I'm working, plus I have an excellent view of the ocean from my seawater table. I've only had two isopods die so far, and they were from the control group (starved) so it doesn't really matter.
Today I woke up, went for a short run, and then went to the lab to work on my introduction. I think at least coming up with an outline for my intro will help organize my thoughts and start reviewing my sources, but it's so slow! I have to think for like 5 minutes before I write anything down. I guess it's not really necessary to have an introduction now anyways.
At 10:30 I had a meeting with my mentor and lab professor, which went well. We talked about a couple good papers I found yesterday. I had lunch with about half of the other REUs and then changed water and food for my 120 containers.
We had our second "science communication" module at 3:00 to peer edit our methods sections. I think methods is the easiest part of a paper to write, so it didn't take me long and the things I need to revise won't take that long either. Hopefully I'll be able to do that tomorrow.
Tomorrow I plan to cut and zip-tie another layer of mesh on top of my containers to help control the temperature a little bit more. I think my isopods died because the water in the containers got too warm over the course of all of the sunny days we had last week. Then I'll look around the lab with the hope of finding 70 larger plastic containers to run my habitat preference trial in (although I doubt I'll have much luck with that- people are pretty possessive about their stuff and our lab is so small that I've memorized everything in there already). There is always "more" to do though, so I might end up reading a couple more papers and working on my intor more too.
Friday morning I'll be going out to harvest some more isopods, ulva, and eelgrass for the feeding trial. On Saturday we're all planning on going into Sebastopol to get ice cream at this legendary ice cream shop and then shop a little bit. There is some concert in Occidental that some people are going to, so I may check that out too. It will be interesting finding time to get all of my runs in this week, but it will happen. On Sunday I'm going seining for fish (pulling some nets along in shallow water at a beach) with some grad students from the lab at 6 am, so hopefully I'll get to see some cool stuff.
It's not all work, though- the last couple nights after reading some papers 5 of us have just been talking and relaxing for a couple hours (making origami, watching Planet Earth, etc.), which has been nice. I'm pretty tired from not really sleeping great for the last week, so I'm going to take a nap and go run hills.
Today I woke up, went for a short run, and then went to the lab to work on my introduction. I think at least coming up with an outline for my intro will help organize my thoughts and start reviewing my sources, but it's so slow! I have to think for like 5 minutes before I write anything down. I guess it's not really necessary to have an introduction now anyways.
At 10:30 I had a meeting with my mentor and lab professor, which went well. We talked about a couple good papers I found yesterday. I had lunch with about half of the other REUs and then changed water and food for my 120 containers.
We had our second "science communication" module at 3:00 to peer edit our methods sections. I think methods is the easiest part of a paper to write, so it didn't take me long and the things I need to revise won't take that long either. Hopefully I'll be able to do that tomorrow.
Tomorrow I plan to cut and zip-tie another layer of mesh on top of my containers to help control the temperature a little bit more. I think my isopods died because the water in the containers got too warm over the course of all of the sunny days we had last week. Then I'll look around the lab with the hope of finding 70 larger plastic containers to run my habitat preference trial in (although I doubt I'll have much luck with that- people are pretty possessive about their stuff and our lab is so small that I've memorized everything in there already). There is always "more" to do though, so I might end up reading a couple more papers and working on my intor more too.
Friday morning I'll be going out to harvest some more isopods, ulva, and eelgrass for the feeding trial. On Saturday we're all planning on going into Sebastopol to get ice cream at this legendary ice cream shop and then shop a little bit. There is some concert in Occidental that some people are going to, so I may check that out too. It will be interesting finding time to get all of my runs in this week, but it will happen. On Sunday I'm going seining for fish (pulling some nets along in shallow water at a beach) with some grad students from the lab at 6 am, so hopefully I'll get to see some cool stuff.
It's not all work, though- the last couple nights after reading some papers 5 of us have just been talking and relaxing for a couple hours (making origami, watching Planet Earth, etc.), which has been nice. I'm pretty tired from not really sleeping great for the last week, so I'm going to take a nap and go run hills.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Ughh I JUST typed this entire post and then got disconnected from the internet and it got deleted, so I'll be brief. I've been super busy this week. So far I've set up half of my main experiment, read more papers, collected more isopods and amphipods, cleaned a lot of algae and seagrass, written my project proposal, started writing my methods and materials section and the reference section, and had my bike fixed.
Tomorrow I need to find 60 amphipods that are 1 cm in length and then measure exact length to a certain bosy segment under the microscope (after calibrating the scale of the microscope ruler to an actual ruler.
It was pretty fun preparing my seawater table for the experiment, because I got to build grid panels with netting on top to keep out the sun.
Tomorrow night there will be fireworks over the bay, which will be cool. On Sunday we're all going over to the REU director's house for a croquet/4th of July party. No one really feels like mingling and playing croquet for four hours since we all want to get more work done on our projects.
Last night we drove along highway 1 for a while and had a beach dinner and went rock climbing, which was fun.
My goal is to have my main experiment up and running by Sunday night.
Tomorrow I need to find 60 amphipods that are 1 cm in length and then measure exact length to a certain bosy segment under the microscope (after calibrating the scale of the microscope ruler to an actual ruler.
It was pretty fun preparing my seawater table for the experiment, because I got to build grid panels with netting on top to keep out the sun.
Tomorrow night there will be fireworks over the bay, which will be cool. On Sunday we're all going over to the REU director's house for a croquet/4th of July party. No one really feels like mingling and playing croquet for four hours since we all want to get more work done on our projects.
Last night we drove along highway 1 for a while and had a beach dinner and went rock climbing, which was fun.
My goal is to have my main experiment up and running by Sunday night.
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