Photos from week one
Posted by Isabel Bukovnik on 2009-06-24
3 Comments
So, I finally got this thing to work! WOOT! I've already had a couple hours worth of blogging lost, so this is quite a relief. By the way, my name is Isabel Bukovnik (obviously I'm part of Howard Hughes or I wouldn't be writing this blog), and I am a raising senior at East Chapel Hill Highschool. (I would say “go wildcats”, but I really don't care that much about sports; I'm more of a theatre nut, actually.) Since the assignment this week (or last week, really) was to upload pictures from my lab, I'm going to jump right into that. I will probably have some more good ones coming later as I get settled in.
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This is me, sitting at the microscope in our lab while Ester, my lovely mentor, takes a picture. I really hate posing for pictures, so take a look at that microscope instead. Pretty cool, huh? The arm sticking out the side is like a periscope: it has a lens that takes the pictures from the slide, combines it with a picture of whatever is on the desktop (usually a piece of paper) and projects the whole thing back through the ocular lenses. It is really helpful when you want to draw what you are seeing in the slide. Like I said, pretty sweet.
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This is the dissecting scope, under which I do, well, dissections. Actually, I cut teeny tiny pieces of lichens and make slides out of them, and try to distinguish all the different parts of lichens by looking at these pieces ridiculously magnified. The slides I make all day long look like this:
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It is absolutely amazing what you can see in a single slide. A whole world of spores and apothecia and algal cells burts forth with incredibly exuberance, and I am left exhausted every day from trying to comprehend the sheer magnitude and complexity of what I am seeing when I glimspe into this alternate universe. It is really quite poetic, non?
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This beaut is from the genus Teloschistes (which I can only pronounce with a Catalan accent, because Ester is from Catalonia and she is the only person I have heard speak this particular word). It is a Spanish lichen that I will be working on, identifying morphological characteristics to match to Ester's phylogenetic tree. This particular Teloschistes acts like tumbleweed: it isn't rooted to the ground, so it tumbles hither and yon, wherever the wind decides to take it.
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This specimen is another lichen I will be working on, from the genus Xanthoria. It is typically bright orange, like ths one. People in the lab say that by the end of this summer, my favorite colour will be orange. I was sceptical at first (it has been green for years), but after I week and a half of Xanthoria, I am beginning to believe them.
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This is a picture of a pile of lichen samples. It seems kind of boring, but imagine a room piled from head to toe in shoeboxes containing hundreds of these samples. It is a little bit daunting to think that I am surrounded by such a wealth of lichens, but also quite inspiring as well.
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This cheerful little guy sits on a shelf near where I work, watching over everything. The third floor (where my lab is found) is plastered with Obama parephenalia. His support of the sciences is much appreciated around here. Someone even named a new species of lichen after him (Caloplaca obamae).
