Yesterday was my first half of my time at Moss Landing Marine Lab. I didn't post yesterday because it's an hour and a half drive, three hours roundtrip, and when I got back home we went out to dinner and when we got back from that, it was almost nine and we had to get up early to make the trip today, so I'll make my two posts today.
Date: 2-19-12 Time Spent: 7.5 hours Total Time: 7.5 hours
Action: The first thing I did when I met my mentor Jenny at Moss Landing was write an article about the slaty-spotted guitarfish (Rhinobatos glaucostigma) for their monthly animal focus on their website. Each month they pick a new species to give a summary of its biology, diet, distribution, identification, etc. I didn't know anything about the animal beforehand but I learned a lot about that particular guitarfish and how to read information on different sites. It wasn't too different from research I do at school but there were different ways to cite information and follow that information back to the first scientist to discover that guitarfish and any research done on that animal since then. That took up three and a half hours.
Next Action: After a quick lunch break we went back to work, looking at contents inside the stomachs of dogfish, specifically cephalopods, like squid and octopi. The specimens were each in their own vial that we dumped out and looked at to catalog and refilled with vials with new ethanol, which preserves the samples. There were many samples so dumping out the old ethanol, making observations about the specimen, like whether it was tissue peices, the tentacles, an eye, or part of the mantle, which is the top part of the squid that holds all its organs, and then refilling the ethanol for each sample took about four hours.
How am I feeling: I would be lying if I didn't say overwhelmed. Just trying to find information for a quick article for their website involved using a new search engine and following unfamiliar citations back to their sources or attempting to backtrack and then double-check information on the internet against hard copies in the library, or trying to find books with information on that particular species was time-consuming more than anything. There was a lot to learn in a very short amount of time and Jenny made sure I was paying attention by quizzing me on certain facts she had lectured about while we were looking for information or cleaning up and cataloging half-eaten cephalopods. I tried my best to suck up information like a sponge but it's hard when you're a strong visual learner and you are trying to keep track of different quirks to a species when you hear it's scientific name or even signs to tell whether the animal is a skate, ray, or shark.
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