7/10-7/16

On Monday, I started the day by helping Emlyn set up the in-lab snail/parasite experiment. I painted the infected and uninfected snails with different colored nail polishes and made them feel bonita. After that we measured the different types of algae (diatoms, green, or cyano) in each of the mud dishes with a bentho torch. The torch reads the wavelengths of the algae to get a measure of its concentration which is prettttty cool. We also had some teachers from a school yard program help us, and together we painted over 800 snails for our field experiment we're doing tomorrow. Once we got a read on all the mud dishes we put the snails in to see how much algae they grub on. Also a teacher took a picture of my notes to show his students that real scientists get their notebooks dirty. So. 

Tuesday was a pretty chill day. I went out in the morning with Emlyn to put out the sentinel snails we painted yesterday. We put 40 in 4 cages at 4 different sites, so that's like, a lot of snails. After that I basically just got to chill. I tidied up the lab and finished up some data entry before heading to the beach. I then went to Emlyn's presentation at our seminar tonight and got a little shout out hehe.

On Wednesday, we took some of the teachers out to collect europanopeus at two different sites. It took awhile and by the end morale was low with the teachers. One of the ladies (Mary <3) fell in the mud twice but she made it out even stronger than she went in. I kind of felt like I was hanging out with cool moms all day. After we finished collecting, we took them back to the wet lab to process them. We sorted all the crabs we collected into the correct species we needed and then released all the rejects. Emlyn also brought her little bebe and the teachers took turns pushing his stroller around in between cracking the oysters looking for crabs. I really feel like an all women society would be ideal after this experience tbh. Any who, we only found about 90 of the europanopeus and only 5 of them were infected. We wanted to put out at least 20 of each of the 4 infected stages for a consumption assay, so we may be back to the drawing board...

On Thursday, I went out again with some teachers at another site to collect more mud crabs. We didn't find many, but apparently the other group did so I guess good for them. One the way to lunch I impressed a bunch of the moms by driving through a ditch so that was awesome. After that we processed them like we did yesterday. We had 6 teachers and I think I did good entertaining them all. I also remembered my computer this time so I could enter data directly into my data sheet which was. uh. good. We made quick work of the crabs since I had already taught some of the teachers the day before. Todas (Emlyn's baby (also not sure how to spell Todd-as)) grabbed my hand while I was showing Emlyn a crab and I that really scared me. After that I watched Scott Pilgrim vs the World with the roomies and we tried to watch a rocket launch but we didn't see anything. The rocket was probably stupid anyways. Live Update: the launch was canceled at T-40. So. Stupid Space-X. 

On Friday, I finished up some data entry and finally entered the meta data for our consumption sheet. I also gave the mud/algae dishes an additional 20 mL of water because she looked thirsty. I then tried to collect as many of the snails stranglers as possible from the flow through tank to release with the rest of the uninfected snails we had previously collected. When I finished that I went to the last teacher lunch to say bye to all the teachers. It was nice and kind of sad, but I got a hug from Mary so like score. After that, me, Shawna, and Clara went out kayaking to release the snails. We went a little bit further than planned for a little joy ride hehe. When we got back I tidied up a bit and cleaned our buckets before speed biking home to avoid a storm. That night we went to a bonfire hosted by the head field technician which was really swanky. Dr. Challis even played frisbee with us :3. We then tried to watch another rocket launch but saw nothing again (likely canceled). We did see a lot of bioluminescence in the water though. Cha-chang.