I arrived in Santa Barbara mid-day on Monday and my parents drove me up to the house that I was going to be staying in. It was high up on the hills outside of the city and when we got there was saw the most beautiful home. The house was originally a Spanish misson, then later was turned into a school and eventually developed into a gorgeous house. Although the guest house of this mansion was very pretty and the owners were extremely kind for offering up their space for the summer, transportation to and from the UCSB campus where my internship is would have been a large trek everyday. So my parents and I set out on a mission to find housing closer to campus. Although it took a couple of days and a change in plans for my parents trip, we were able to secure on campus housing.
Unfortunately though, trying to find housing took time away from me being in the lab. I was able to finally spend a whole day in the lab on Friday where I worked with a college intern named Stephanie on her project. Her current project is cultivating phytoplankton with different levels of carbon 13 in it (a carbon 13 is a very isotope heavy element). I helped her perform cell counts on samples of the phytoplankton. After growing the phytoplankton she feeds it to a collection of mussels and scallops. Although I’m not completely sure what we are looking for in correlation with the phytoplankton and the shellfish and the overall impact this had on the labs main focus of kelp, it was interesting to be working with sea organisms since due to location I’ve never had the resources to do any science with them.
I arrived at my internship the same week that the students were taking finals and graduating, so campus has been super busy the last few days and it’s fun seeing all the movement of college life at a big school. I haven’t gotten the opportunity to spend much time with my mentor Bob Miller though, but when we initially met he was super concerned with my housing situation and he seems like he’s going to be great to work with this summer!
We’ll see what the next few weeks bring!
Mikaela Balkind
University of California Santa Barbara
Marine Biology
Correction: Now that I have learned way more about Stephanie’s project, I realize that my initial idea of what she was doing with the carbon-13 is kinda wrong. She wasn’t adding different levels to the phytoplankton, she put the same amount in each container and then each week we fed the invertebrates the cultivated phytoplankton. Now we are measuring how much carbon-13 the organisms actually took in. After a couple of weeks in the lab, working with her and on her project things are all starting to make sense!