The Others

A rather ominous blog title, for an interesting aside in my research. This week I have focused on two major tasks with my work: (1) using fluorescence microscopy to assess nematode microbead ingestion; and (2) assessing microbead ingestion by the other animals that were in the microcosms. Unfortunately, the fluorescence tests for the umpteenth time, didn't go as planned, so I don't have results or much to say there, but the other animal investigation was quite fun and is the focus of this week's blog. I did, however, need to snap a few shots of some nematodes, so I include one here of one of my favorites, Xyala.

While four out of every five multicellular animals on the planet are nematodes, and while there are close to 100 billion nematodes for every human on the Earth, there are plenty of other animals that inhabit the space between the sediment grains. We don't often work with animals other than nematodes in our lab, but sometimes we assess the diversity of life between sediment grains or use other organisms like copepods to provide more information about the health of an area. In the microplastics microcosm study I ran this past summer, I did not work to exclude other interstitial animals from the sediments, so there were a handful of non-nematode fauna that I wanted to assess to see if they ate any microbeads. Again, like the rest of this work, I can't provide detailed findings because I need to keep that under wraps until all the work is done and [hopefully] submitted as a manuscript.

These others, as I've called them, only consisted of kinorhynchs--also known as mud dragons--and copepods, which is a bit surprising, given that this area is a relatively healthy part of the bay system. Their overall abundances were quite low, which adds another interesting wrinkle to this narrative; I somehow feel like this whole narrative is a connect-the-dots but with lots of curved sections. I am hoping to have all of the ingestion data done by the end of next week, though, which means that the final big round of work can begin, which is the data assessment/analysis, and writing phase. While I have already started a good portion of the writing for this work, until I see the data and the results, I can't fully build the narrative, as I don't want the tone of the introduction to be opposed by the results. I can say that I can finally see the finish line for this project, which means I will have learned some more interesting things about how microplastics might be affecting local marine ecosystems and that I will be one step closer to graduating (still over a year away).

​See you next week!

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