Flexibility in the Sciences

This week I was really hoping to share pictures from my first sampling trip for my microplastics research. Unfortunately, the weather and hurricane conditions had other plans. It is always important to be flexible with field research because you can't always control what is going to happen, and I even teach my students that our job as scientists is to do the best we can by preparing our research and conducting our experiments, as well as informing our readers of what happened that we couldn't control. I will be going to do field work, do not worry, I just need to find another time that will work for my schedule. Pictures will definitely accompany the field sampling.

Instead, this week I thought it would be fun to play a Where's Waldo (or Wally for my British friends) game with nematodes. Below are two rounds of the game and the first picture in each round is unmarked so that you can try to find the nematodes. The picture underneath it has boxes around each nematode so that you can check your answer. If you want to show this to younger members of your family they can test their ability to spot the exceptionally small animals that live between grains of sand in the ocean. I have also included the number of nematodes for each picture so that you aren't looking around to determine if you have found every one. Good luck!

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There are three nematodes in this photo

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 There are three nematodes in this photo (it's a little harder)

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