I wanted to start this post off by saying that one day I walked into the lab and Carola was listening to the Wicked soundtrack and I got it stuck in my head and went home and downloaded it, and since then that has been all that I've listened to.
The past weeks has been a mix of busy and waiting for things to do. One day the maintenance crew was supposed to do work on the fume hood, but never did, so we wasted a day that could have been used to extract FA from tissue samples. Other than that, it's been pretty busy in the lab.
Mike and Mario went out to Tuckerton to fish for the blue crabs and caught around 85-90 which they brought back. To go into more detail, we're using the crabs to find a baseline for the FA levels in blue crabs based on 2 different diets (black sea bass and clams). Again, FA are used as dietary trackers to construct a food web. The concentration of FA in prey will dictate the FA concentration in predators, and by knowing those specific concentrations, a food web can be constructed. That's what the crabs will be used for in the gulf project which as a reminder is basically to construct a food web in the Gulf of Mexico to see if the 2010 Horizon oil spill affected it in any way.
Anyway, Steph, Carola, and I prepped for the crabs while Mike and Mario were catching them. Mike had bought tupperware that holds around 1.5 liters of water, what the crabs are being held in. I labelled 88 of those with a square of plain making tape to give a number to the crab, and with either red or blue tape for respectively a sea bass or clam diet. We rigged the tubing for the bubblers to aerate the sea water. The crabs are fed every day, and the water changed every weekday.
The sea bass we prepared already for the crabs to eat, as mentioned in the previous entry. On friday, Mike, Carola, Steph, and I prepared the clams, and let me tell you it was the most disgusting think I've done in a while. The clams were relatively fresh, Mike bought them the previous day and they had been caught around Monday of Tuesday, but unlike fresh fish, fresh clams still smell very very bad. For almost 3 hours, Mike and I shared a cutting board and minced the clams with filleting knives while Steph and Carola did the same except with scissors, and we packed the goop into ice cube trays. Standing and in a constant state of nausea for an extended period of time isn't fun, and I wouldn't recommend it to those with a queezy stomach. I couldn't be in marine biology for the smell alone, although Mike tells me that a lot of the field is working with models and computers, not as much lab work as you would think, and I've gotten to do most of the dirty work.
Steph and I also did a lot of errands during our lunch breaks. Things like picking up markers and a white board for the lab, etc. However, since Mario killed all the little fish in his aquarium in his office, Steph and I went to Petco and got 2 more guppies, a yellow one I named Owen Wilson, and an orange one. We asked the cashier what we should name the orange one, and he said creamsicle,and since his name is Joe we named the fish Creamsickle Joe.
Mrs. Terhaar is visiting tomorrow, so I'll have to be doing something more exciting than cleaning test tubes.
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