The End of an Era: A Numbers Game

A small portion of the corner I procured at the lab for all of my samples. The large tubes are nematode extractions and the small ones in the back right are microplastics.

This week, I am happy to announce that I have finished the initial and middle portions of the first chapter of my dissertation. Today (Thursday), I completed the final cleaning protocols for the remaining microplastic samples, which means that moving forward I have only spectroscopy and size data to collect and analyze. This work represents 18 months of research and so I thought for this week I would lay out the numbers associated with my research process, with regards to the amount of samples and time I have dedicated to this work. Stay tuned til the end to find out about what is still to come.

The basics: 6 trips to St. Andrews Bay and 4 trips out at the Florida State University Coastal and Marine Laboratory over the past 18 months, which, in total, represents 444 samples and 78 samples, respectively. From the samples, I have run 522 nematode and 522 microplastics extractions at the lab over the last year and a half. Based on my best estimates, that puts the amount of time I have dedicated to the nematode extractions at 163 hours and nearly 95 hours for microplastics extractions. Since I have an additional step in the microplastics extraction/processing phase, I have estimated an additional 126 hours for microplastics cleaning. 

I have also dedicated approximately 27 hours so far to microplastics analysis using laser spectroscopy, and my undergraduate research assistants have spent close to 30 hours analyzing microplastic images to collect size data. Therefore, if I total up the hours for the research trips (times not listed) and the analysis portion of the research, my team and I have spent 537 hours on this research, which doesn't even include the amount of time that I have spent traveling to and from the lab, nor the time where I was teaching myself how to do microplastics extractions and analyses.

I am really happy with the work my team and I have done so far, and I am excited that I am moving into the final phase of this research. I now can focus on analyzing all of the particles I have extracted to assess which particles are microplastics, what type of plastic they are, and how large the particles are. My goal is to be done with all of this work by May so that I can begin the second portion of my dissertation. The second part of my research focuses on the association between environmental quality and nematode community structure, using the nematodes that I have extracted from all of the aforementioned samples. I will continue to write weekly updates throughout, and can't wait to take you along the new journey when the time comes.

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