What's Coming Up?

A quick sunset snapshot of a sandy beach near the marine lab.

Most weeks on the blog I focus on the exciting things that have happened during the week. This week, however, I wanted to look toward the future, as summer is slowly starting to wind down. Although it may seem like summer just started, I will start classes in just over a month. In that month, though, I have a lot I'd like to get done, and some cool opportunities coming up.

Next week I will head out into the field to conduct a summer sampling day in Panama City as part of the big project that I have dedicated most of the blog posts to. Along with the summer Panama City trip, I will also likely conduct sampling off the coast of the marine lab and I hope to take out some students (undergrads and grad students) who have never done field work, either due to lack of opportunities or their program is not a field-based research program. I think that, especially for undergraduates, the opportunity to get involved in hands-on field research can help inspire career pathways or future fields of study, and I was lucky enough to do field research during my undergraduate program that--along with some other factors--led me here.

I also hope to have my big review paper published sometime very soon (Edit: it was published a day after writing this, and you can read the whole paper for free here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2021.685327/full). Dr. Ingels and I have been waiting and we have reached out since the work was accepted, and has gone through the editing and processing phases. Through the field research that I have done, the reading that has guided my dissertation, and the conversations that have structured much of my time here at FSU, I authored a major review on the status of marine nematodes as bioindicators and, along with Dr. Ingels, identified areas that are still lacking in the field of marine nematology (hint: indicators of a more novel ocean pollutant that is a harmful tiny polymer).

In the last month-or-so of summer, I hope to finish processing all of the spring samples and potentially I will also finish the summer Panama City samples. What comes next is a lot of slide-making, plastic identifications, laser analysis, and nematode identifications. Nematode identifications will be the last step that I have not talked much about, but I will be sure to get some great photos of the process so that you can see the interesting morphologies of these important near-invisible animals.

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