The Best Low Quality Pictures Ever!

This week has been all about microplastic photos. I finally received my SD card reader for my computer, which means that I am able to take better pictures of my samples using the microscope's camera, rather than shooting my iPhone camera through the microscope eye piece. One challenge, however, is that many microplastic particles are translucent, and therefore interact with the light, which makes capturing high-quality images quite challenging. Furthermore, since I have multiple microplastics in the same physical space, all the particles within a picture receive the same light conditions, which is not ideal. For example, there are 5 microplastics in the image to the left and they are all colored. Four of them show up quite nicely; the red fibers, the blue fiber, and the gray fiber are easy to see, even though it is harder to differentiate the blue from the gray. However, the fifth microplastic is a green microfragment, and it does not show up very well on the image because of the light I used. Theoretically I could go and create two pictures for this set of particles and use two different sets of lighting, but that takes more time and takes up more space in our shared folder. Instead, my undergraduate research assistant, Emily, will go in and measure the particles in the image that she can clearly identify and then mark down that she was unable to see and measure the green particle, which will let me know that I need to go back and take a quick picture and do a fast image analysis at the lab to capture the remaining data.

These images are an important aspect of my research, as there's a chance that not all the microplastics that I picked out from the sediment samples are less than 5 mm. I have seen some of the particles that look rather large, and it is up to Emily and her image analysis to determine which particles are and are not microplastics. Emily is working on assessing how microplastic size is related to the distance the particle is from the input source. As a first-year undergraduate student, this is her first time getting hands-on experience in data collection and analysis, and she chose to join my work as part of Florida State's Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, that pairs researchers with first- and second-year students who are looking to get valuable experience. Note, I meant to get a picture of our image analysis training session this morning, and I forgot. We were just having such a good time working through the software and comparing our measurements to see how accurate we were.

Next week will likely be more nematode content, as I am working through more nematode samples and I will soon start identifying the organisms for my research. I hope that I can take my team out on the water, however red tide is still here in Florida, which is making this field season a big challenge. If I'm out on the water, then you can expect some great pictures of my team looking exhausted after a long day of research. The work of a scientist is never dull!

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