On to Step Two

This week I finished washing all 32 of the mesocosms and separated the macrofauna and meiofauna from the residual sediment. Therefore, I moved on to step two in the sediment processing, which is the counting and analysis phase. While I only looked through five samples this week, I am happy to learn that the samples are not packed to the brim with fauna. Going through each meiofauna sample took between 1.5 and 2 hours, with each sample having similar numbers of animals. It will take me longer to process samples with more animals, of course, but this current pace is acceptable in my opinion. The one issue I've noticed is that none of the fauna were stained even though I added the stain to all of the samples. This means that every sample I looked at today had translucent fauna, which increases the amount of time it takes me to process the samples, since the animals are translucent rather than pink/red. I added an extra drop of stain to all the samples before I left today, so I'm hoping to get back to the lab next week and have colorful samples. Otherwise, I'm going to be stuck with a difficult few weeks ahead of me.

Step two also involves slide making, so I will spend every other day at the lab mounting the animals on slides. Rather than processing and picking out animals from every sample and then making slides all at once, I go back and forth between these two processes to limit the amount of lab materials I am using as we have a limited amount of containers and space to store all these materials. Additionally, going between counting and slide making helps me make the most use of my time, as I can usually process an extra sample during the week by going between these two steps. My goal is to have the meiofauna counted and slides made for all samples by mid-October. After I make all the slides, I will likely move to making slides for the macrofauna samples, which should go faster since the organisms are larger and won't require the same precision searching as the meiofauna samples. Sadly, no picture this week, as I couldn't find the microscope's SD card and by the time I realized it wasn't in the microscope, I had finished going through my last sample for the day. Next week's blog will definitely come with a photo, maybe of an unexpected animal in a sample, because who knows what I will find. Stay tuned!