Excitement is a Brewing

Last week we were so busy at the lab that I didn't get a chance to post. We had two groups of students from Georgia visiting as part of our outreach opportunities for underserved communities. Alongside Dr. Ingels, Chenoah (another graduate student in the lab) and our wonderful outreach team, we took the students and their teachers into the field to study life between sediment grains and to see the larger fauna that inhabit our coastal areas and ocean. Unfortunately the weather had alternate plans for the days, but the kids had a lot of fun on the beach, in the water, and in the lab. We even caught some tardigrades with our beach sampling, and our highlight of the two days was an isopod that was incredibly fast, aptly named Flash. The tardigrade int he photo above is so hard to see because I took this picture with my phone camera, but the crystal-like structures are sand grains while the off-white shape is the tardigrade.

I've also been continuing work on side projects at the lab while I pause before my research picks back up in mid-July. I am grateful for this slight break, as the weather here has been quite awful for field collections; we've had rain almost daily, with flooding and hurricane watches. However, I am ready to get back into the field to finish up this final project and I am currently working on preparing the aquarium tank for the large number of mesocosms it will house. I've decided to mark individual squares throughout the tank so that there's less bias in this work: each square and mesocosm will be numbered which will correspond to the microplastic treatment level. The treatment levels will not be labeled on the jars, which will prevent bias and/or special treatment in the data collection process.

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