The Busiest Time of Year

Well, maybe not exactly, but it has been a very busy week in the meiolab. This week, I had the pleasure of presenting preliminary results from my microplastic feeding experiment at the 18th International Meiofauna Conference to ~50 researchers from around the world. This was only my second conference, but I had a more enjoyable time at this one than at the previous conference, though they were both virtual (I would have loved to travel to New Zealand). And while I'm not sure that meiofauna will be the focus of my future research, I enjoyed hearing from meiobenthologists and talking with them about where I think microplastics research fits into conversations about ecotoxicology and bioindication.

At the same time, I have been working on three other projects, which include manuscript revisions for some of my previous research, a manuscript review for a journal, and finish up sample processing at the lab. Today, I finished processing all 90 samples from this microplastics project (shown here), thanks in large part to Sean's hard work over the past few months, and I now have the task of finishing up slide making and then working through all the nematodes. In total, I have fully finished with 36/90 slides, accounting for [x] nematodes with [x] nematodes left to analyze. While I had hoped to finish the full analysis of these data by now, covid setbacks, hurricanes, and experimental issues caused me to slow down a little, which isn't a problem in the long run, since my last experiment isn't scheduled until this summer.

Over the next one to two months, I will finish identifying which nematodes have eaten the microbeads and then I will work to quantify the number of plastics they ingested to wrap up this experiment. And while microscopy is one of my least favorite aspects of my work, I do really enjoy putting in my headphones, listening to music or a podcast, and chipping away at the work.

​'Til next time!

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