Hi everyone, I just finished my final full week working at the Miller Lab at UCSB.
On Monday this week me and my roommate Sam had to get up super early to meet our groups to go out on the boats that day. This was the first day that we weren’t working together during our internship. I got to work with Frankie Puerzer and Inez Mangino, who both work in Miller Lab and a few other girls from a different lab. Before we could get out on the water I helped out loading gear like, scuba tanks, bean bags, and camera equipment, into the diving boat that we were using for the day. Once we were all loaded up we went out to the harbor to put the boat in and headed out to our first site named Bullito. The boat ride out to the site was about a hour and a half away so I got to take a nap in a giant, fuzzy diving parka and in one of the bean bags. It was super nice because sleeping on boats is one of my favorite places to catch a nap. Once we arrived at the site I did my best to help the others get set up for the dive. Their goals were to sample water from each transect and photograph each to upload into Viqi when we got back. Between switching out air tanks the girls brough me a few different types of seaweed and a little baby starfish. After we finished up at Bullito we headed over to the Naples site. There we again sampled water and took pictures of the transects. While on the boat we saw some dolphins in the water, some did flips out
of the water too! Once done we headed back to the lab to clean the boat and put away all of the gear we used.
Tuesday we went to the last lecture of the class we participated in. This weeks topic was marine pollution and biomonitoring taught by Mark Page. We talked about different pollutants and their effects on the ecosystems. For example, biomagnification is where smaller organisms eat particles of toxins and as other organisms eat them and move up the food chain, so does the concentration of the toxins in organisms. We also talked about the lasting effects from DDT usage and alternatives to pesticides used today. After lecture we went into lab and continued working through more transects on ViQi and checking each others work. Billy Ray came up and pulled some frozen clams out for us to look at. It was wild to see the size difference
in different samples. After work we went out to dinner and order little bunt cakes to celebrate my birthday.
Wednesday and Thursday we continued to work through transects and checking them. In the log we could look back to see past Pinhead Interns work on ViQi. We discovered we have done more work on Viqi than any of the past interns here. After work on Thursday we biked to Target to pickup some frozen dinners to last up till the end of the of the internship because we were over pasta at that point and only had two bags left.
Friday we spent the morning working on Viqi going through transects and checking each others work. We have almost
The tiny cryo tubes we labeled for Billy that will be put into liquid nitrogen.
finished all of the sites for 2018. During the afternoon Billy came up and asked us if we could help him label vials for his upcoming dive on Monday. One specific type of vial was going to be used to collect liquid that was entering the incurrent syphon and collect liquid from the excurrent syphon of a clam. We also labeled some other types of vials with other important information.
On Saturday and Sunday we spent the days completing chores, hanging out, packing, and going to the beach. I can’t wait to share what we do in our final days before we leave on Wednesday!
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