A Full Circle Moment in Research

I've realized, after talking to undergraduates and other graduate students, that what I do when conducting research is not well understood by the general public. Therefore, this week's post is dedicated to explaining more about what I do in the lab and about a great full circle moment. I go out and sample ocean sediment by taking a large sediment coring tool and dropping it into the ocean, until it reaches the ocean floor. After hammering the corer into the ocean floor, I pull the sediment corer back up to the boat and cap off the end, to seal the sediment and water into the tube. Then, with plenty of help, I extrude the water from the corer so that I have a column of ocean sediment, from which I extract samples. This is a very messy process and I like to think of the sampling process as a mix of playing in the mud and also getting a great exfoliation treatment due to the plethora of salt water that I get doused in.

Once I've collected enough samples, I process the sediment in the lab by filtering the samples through two different sieves, pictured above. The larger sieve separates macrofauna (larger organisms) from the meiofauna (small organisms between 32 and 62 micrometers) and the smaller sieve separates the meiofauna from anything smaller. The separation process is often called washing or sieving, and once a process is sieved I place it in the centrifuge, along with ludox, a chemical solution that will help separate the meiofauna by density separation. Density separation is a key process in my work with meiofauna and with microplastics, and I use the natural densities of organisms and particles to separate mixtures into their components. The separation and centrifugation process happens three times to ensure the sample is completely separated. After samples are separated, the meiofauna are collected and preserved until I am ready to look at the samples under the microscope.

This past week, I had a great full circle moment in processing samples at the lab. Last September, shortly after starting my program at FSU, Dr. Ingels asked me to accompany him on a sampling trip in the Gulf for a project he has been working on. The sampling work that we conducted was my first experience working with sediment samples and I got great hands-on experience in the field. The picture below is from the samples that I was separating in the lab this past week; the samples were the ones that Dr. Ingels and I collected in September, which means I have now sampled and processed my own specimens for the first time. I am really excited to see what the future of my research holds, but this past week was definitely an exciting one for me at the lab.

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