Hello my lovelies out there in SG land. I'm in a pretty good mood. I payed my rent for the next 3 months so that I don't have to worry about it while I'm gone which is a load off. If nothing else I have a place to come home to.
Going up to the cave to collect some more of my worms and some other samples. We are looking to do a stable isotope analysis of various materials in the cave to determine the source of the worms food. Having two problems, and they both have to do with people not emailing me back. This first is that I don't know the correct way to preserve the worms for taxonomic identification. The other is, I don't know how to collect the biofilm (the hypothesis food source) from the stalagmites/tites with out damaging them. Talked to a geology prof and he really wasn't much help. He said collect the dripping water and hope there is enough biofilm in it to test. So it looks like I'm going to be spending my day looking for research in biofilm collection and worm preservation
In other news, my freshwater invert zoology class is cruising along. I have to have 25 specimens collected, labeled, individually contained in 75% alcohol, and classified down to genus, with at least one down to species. I was getting pretty nervous about it because the day before yesterday I had 11 done and the species (which is a lot of work) not completed. So yesterday I classified my dragonfly larvae down to species, and got a phantom midge, cadisfly, and a diving beetle all down to genus. Looks like only 11 more identifications to go
just one more bit of news. Okay two more...... I got an email from TAMU asking about meal preferences, I know this doesn't seem like a big deal but it makes me excited in two ways. 1) I'm not going to be forced to eat meat or starve while I'm in TX! 2) this is really real and it's really getting close! close enough for them to be ordering food.
the second bit it that one of my best friends was just accepted to NYU!!!! He's going to be in the philosophy graduate program, which, I don't have to tell you, is incredibly bad ass.
Going up to the cave to collect some more of my worms and some other samples. We are looking to do a stable isotope analysis of various materials in the cave to determine the source of the worms food. Having two problems, and they both have to do with people not emailing me back. This first is that I don't know the correct way to preserve the worms for taxonomic identification. The other is, I don't know how to collect the biofilm (the hypothesis food source) from the stalagmites/tites with out damaging them. Talked to a geology prof and he really wasn't much help. He said collect the dripping water and hope there is enough biofilm in it to test. So it looks like I'm going to be spending my day looking for research in biofilm collection and worm preservation
In other news, my freshwater invert zoology class is cruising along. I have to have 25 specimens collected, labeled, individually contained in 75% alcohol, and classified down to genus, with at least one down to species. I was getting pretty nervous about it because the day before yesterday I had 11 done and the species (which is a lot of work) not completed. So yesterday I classified my dragonfly larvae down to species, and got a phantom midge, cadisfly, and a diving beetle all down to genus. Looks like only 11 more identifications to go
just one more bit of news. Okay two more...... I got an email from TAMU asking about meal preferences, I know this doesn't seem like a big deal but it makes me excited in two ways. 1) I'm not going to be forced to eat meat or starve while I'm in TX! 2) this is really real and it's really getting close! close enough for them to be ordering food.
the second bit it that one of my best friends was just accepted to NYU!!!! He's going to be in the philosophy graduate program, which, I don't have to tell you, is incredibly bad ass.
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I hope you found solutions to your problems. Here are some links that might be useful.
http://www.nrri.umn.edu/worms/research/methods_worms_preserve.html
http://www.efcweb.org/efcweb_media/Downloads/EFC+WP10/BR99_02b.pdf (Biofilm preservation)
Your research is so far out of my field... but like all new scientific experiments you'll probably just have to try a bunch of different things to see what works with your worms and biofilms. It's likely the number of successful biofilm collectors in the world might only fill a small conference room, so there are probably no DIY texts.