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.