Planning for the Future

This week was a short week, but exciting as I finished nematode identifications and non-nematode fauna IDs for the microcosm experiment. While there is still one set of statistical analyses that I still want to run, I have enough information to finish writing the results and explain what I've learned from this project. The highlight of this week, however, was meeting with two researchers from Sweden who I have been working with to smartly plan for this final summer of research. I am grateful for their support, as their work has laid the foundation for my own, and they were incredibly helpful and identified potential pitfalls in my research plan. While we likely won't be able to bring them over for the summer based on their own schedules, they remain great resources for this final chapter of my dissertation.

What is this final chapter? Well my whole dissertation focus has lead to this point. First, I needed to understand the magnitude of microplastics in our local ecosystems in Florida, as many microplastics experiments use levels of pollution that elicit a response that may be unlike responses in natural conditions. Second, I wanted to understand the diversity of a local Florida ecosystem to see if stressors in the system are leaving only a few resilient nematode taxa to thrive. In this third chapter, as I have talked about over the past few months, I wanted to assess why nematodes may be consuming microplastics in the sediment, as reasons why fauna eat microplastics are current theoretical and haven't been robustly studied. In this last chapter, I will take and combine what I've learned from the previous chapters to assess how microplastics pollution affects fundamental ecosystem functions in the sediment. While there are many processes in marine sediments that nematodes support, nutrient cycling and the formation of microhabitats are two key examples. I will be using another laboratory experiment to study some aspects of these roles and will spend the summer conducting this study.

While I expect the next few weeks to be quieter than usual, I will still provide mini-updates, so stay tuned!