Before I forget..On Wednesdays, we have talks from the grad students and some other folks about their research. This week, it was Sean Kelley from the UPR. His talk was interesting although, not quite up my alley. His work focuses on the effects of spatial subsidies on riparian web building spiders. Specifically, he looks at the partitioning of resources coming out of the stream (mayfly, caddisfly larvae etc.) that cross the boundary from the aquatic to the terrestrial and how they move through foodwebs. Spiders are his organism of interest and to try and understand how the food web works in this specific instance, he will be using tagged stable isotopes to track nutrient flow. This is still pretty confusing for me, but he has a very interesting lecture about it complete with figures from his own data. Nice job, Sean.
Tuesday, I put out my last set of samples. There are three streams that I am working in, with 10 replicates of 5 treatments in each stream. Our streams represent an urbanization gradient, (none, moderate, and high). The treatments are chemical treatments of caffeine, diuron (an algaecide), sucrose, and sucralose plus a control, with no chemical addition. We have set the agar cups out with no chemical additions right now, so that we can cultivate some biofilms before introducing them to chemically amended environments via chemically amended agar gels. They are out now and will sit for 3 weeks to cultivate biofilms. After we switch them out at 3 weeks, we will let them grow for about another week at which point we will take them out, measure metabolism (consisting of primary productivity and respiration) biomass and chlorophyll-a content. We are expecting to find that when comparing the controls of the urbanization gradient, that biofilm function is suppressed as urbanization increases. For the caffeine treatment, we expect it to lower biofilm functional response measurement relative to the controls (Rosi-Marshall et al. 2013). For sucralose, we expect the same diminished effect on functional response. For sucrose, since it is a disaccharide thats easily degraded by microbes, we expect it to increase biofilms function and biomass. For diuron, it's a bit tricky. Diuron is an algaecide that inhibits primary production- aka it stops algae and cyanobacteria from doing their job (fixing carbon with sunlight energy via photosynthesis) while fungi and bacteria are still chewing away and respiring. So we expect a community shift from mixed heterotrophs (decomposers bacteria and fungi) and autotrophs (primary producing algae and cyanobacteria) to a primarily heterotrophic community where primary production stops and respiration continues.
What that means for me is that the next three weeks will be pretty slow in terms of field work. But there is always work to be done. At the end of the summer, I have to submit a final manuscript of my project including and abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, works cited + figures, tables and legends. In addition, I will create a poster, a succinct version of my project to present at a symposium at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. In the meantime, I will try to perfect my introduction and the parts of the poster that can be addressed.
That leaves a lot of time to well... stay busy. The past two days, I have noticed how much I am sitting around, reading or on the computer so today, I decided that no more of that, If I am not working, I shouldn't be sitting around. So, I cleaned off the moldy yoga mat, so with that drying in the drying room, maybe tomorrow I can do some stretching and practice my push up.... that does not exist yet.
I have these few weeks and while we, as an REU group, go do fun things on the weekends, the rest of the week is saved for field work. So I am thinking that maybe next week, I will go do some exploring (if Sofia and Alonso are okay with it) with one of the field techs here at El Verde. Her name is Roxy-she's super cool and turns out that Natalia, the PhD student she is working for will be at a conference next week in Costa Rica for The Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation. Roxy said we should go explore the island and hopefully, I can go with maybe do some ocean kayaking or other fun touristy things.
But about that conference, and the poster I will have at the end of this summer... Next year, the conference is going to be in Australia. I told Worm that since he has always wanted to go to Australia, I would apply for next years conference with an abstract from the research that I am focusing on this summer. If I get accepted, we are going on vacation to Australia!!!!! How cool would that be?! I'm sort of daydreaming about this but I am going to try to make it a reality. Until now, I have only presented a poster at UT's Undergrad Research Exhibition. Having a presentation or poster talk from a national meeting looks great and is pretty necessary on a CV for grad school, which is distant but definitely a part of my future.
Exciting stuff, wish there was more I could tell you about!
Sooner or later, we will be going on a night hike. Everybody has been asking the REU's "have you been into the forest at night? It's something you must do before you leave, because it is totally different from what you experience during the day in terms of fauna." No joke, probably 5 people have asked and told me this.
Bye Guys :)
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