Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Shiny Beads

While I may not be a 10-year-old detective from the fictional town of Idaville, Florida, I was able to solve a problem that Dr. Ingels and I had with visualizing the fluorescent particles in my experiment. This week I took a trip over to FSU's MagLab, which houses all kinds of exorbitantly expensive scientific tools, to use a microscope system that is probably 5-10x more expensive than what we have at the marine lab. Specifically, the microscope has more fluorescent filter cubes which are able to excite the fluorescent particles and block out the emitted light that we are not interested in seeing. The microscope software also allows for extremely high quality photographs, measurements, and easy toggles between modes, which made for some great pictures and data from this week's session. I will be going back multiple times to get more pictures and data, but I am very happy with what I discovered in this week's session.

Here you can see one of the many photographs that I took of the microplastics (note: the microplastics are blue, so the green is the fluorescence shining back), and this image is actually two separate photographs layered. The base photo is a bright field image, which allows for clear white light, while the top layer is the fluorescent filter photograph, which shows the clear shape of the microplastics. One of the reasons I chose a layered image for this work is that the bright field offers nice underlying contrast that you cannot see with just fluorescent images. The downside of this high powered microscope is that the field of vision is more limited than the microscope I use at the lab, and the joystick, while smooth, doesn't allow for quick movements around the slide, so I had to spend a lot of time today finding the nematodes. However, next week I will draw out all of the slides on a reference sheet so that I know how many nematodes are on each slide and their relative orientations for easy identification. Overall I worked through three total samples today, but I am confident that I can quickly move through the rest with a little extra preparation.

Over the next two weeks I will be working through as many samples as I can because I am presenting the preliminary results from this experiment at the 18th International Meiofauna Conference in New Zealand. Unfortunately the conference is virtual this year--really wish I could present this work in New Zealand--but I am excited to share some results on how microbe-microplastics interactions affect nematode feeding behaviors.

Tune in next week for more updates on the status of this project!

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