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.