Plans for the New Year

Welcome to the new year! I hope 2023 is as good, if not better for all of you than 2022 was. This week I want to spend some time outlining my plans for this upcoming year, and talk about the research that I am working on. I had hoped to share a different update this week, but the timing didn't work out (but stay tuned).

This year I will be finishing up the latter half of my dissertation, which includes the microplastic ingestion project that I've been writing about, as well as an ecosystem function project that I hope to start this summer. By the end of next week I will have assessed microplastic ingestion across all 90 microcosm replicates and I will move on to the final part(s) of this project--assessing how many particles each individual nematode ate. My goal is to finish this work by the end of March (although earlier would be great too). Like the rest of my work, I am planning to write a manuscript for publication based on this research, and I have already started with a basic outline and some writing notes.

This summer, I am planning to run an experiment that assesses how microplastics affect the important tasks that nematodes and other benthic fauna carry out in marine sediments. This project will not have as many replicates as the current work, but it will be more technically challenging, with lots of data collection and analyses. I am really excited about this part of the project, because this aspect of microplastics pollution is what I originally pitched when I was applying to graduate school.

In the interim, I will be working on writing up a manuscript on nematode communities of the Panama City Beach area, giving a seminar to the ecology and evolutionary biology side of the FSU biology department on my work, celebrating the work of my friends who are presenting this semester, and hopefully getting in the field to help with my roommate's sharks and rays work.

This week's photo update is brought to you by a nematode who really snacked on a large amount of microplastics. Stay tuned for next week's update, and hopefully an exciting piece of news!

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