Woke up, got out of bed/ Dragged a comb across my head
Almost every morning, all the Howard Hughes kids meet up in the BioSci building and we either have group discussions, amazing seminars, or field trips (!!). Then we split up into our labs and begin work there (usually around 9:30 to 10:00)
Every morning the fish are fed, egg boxes are checked, and the number of eggs from each tank is recorded. Depending on the number of eggs the fish choose to provide, we may spawn one or two tanks to collect eggs for experiments.
One of the first things you learn when working with living organisms is that they are fickle. They're selfish and they honestly do not care whether or not you get enough eggs for your experiment. Therefore, you must plan your day around their schedules. On good days, there will be a lot of pregnant fish ("fatties") in both populations (King's Creek and Elizabeth River), and you'll have a nice, busy day where you'll get lots of work done. Inevitably, there will also be days where you have nothing to work with, and it is on days like this that you find time to write blog posts.
Slacker days usually consist of a lot of paper-reading, wikipedia-surfing (I try to stay on topic as much as I can), email-checking, AP-Chem-ing, and blogging, of course. Sometimes I'll shadow someone in my lab while they are doing their experiments, which are totally different from mine. I really enjoy that, because while I will not need to do an EROD assay for this particular project, it's really cool looking at flourescent fish bladders under the microscope. And it might be useful later on, I guess. Through shadowing others I have also chopped/mashed up fish for body PAH-level tests, screened zebrafish embryos, helped with RNA extractions and RT-PCR, and scored fish deformities. Other than that, I just try to make myself helpful.
If we actually do get a good number of eggs out of the egg boxes, we'll manually spawn a few tanks of Killifish for some embryos. The reason why we manually spawn fish (a LOT harder than it sounds, hopefully) is that we want the eggs to be approximately the same age while we are doing our experiments. Within a few hours, an embryo can go from being 1 cell to 32 cells, so to get a uniform experimental group we spawn them at the same time. Plus, manually spawned eggs are much better quality, in general.
Next, I screen the fish under a microscope. I separate the bad eggs from the healthy ones. This is usually a long and arduous process, especially when you have thousands of eggs to screen. Always, always, ALWAYS bring your iPod to the lab; you do not want to be stuck screening eggs without it. Your eyes will bleed from staring at the tiny little buggers for hours on end (this is unavoidable), but there is no reason why you need to be bored out of your mind as well.
In the afternoon, we dose the embryos that we gathered in the morning. We give them their poison. Then we record mortality rates at 24 and 48 hours. I always feel bad knowing that even the controls, which I consider lucky since they usually survive my experiments, will die when we're done with them. To euthanize embryos we just pop them in the freezer for a few hours. But then again, we eat fish all the time, and don't feel bad about eating caviar, so I guess this isn't that different.
Max usually comes by the lab in the late afternoon to feed the fish, change the water in the killifish systems, and make sure everything's running properly. Most days it is, but once in a while something goes wrong. Like yesterday. One of the pumps in the Z-system broke, lowering the dissolved oxygen levels in the water. As a result, a few of the bigger fish were asphyxiated. By the way, Max is ginormous (6'8''??). Just fyi.
Haha okay so yesterday we had to evacuate the building because of a "fire" (this isn't really an ordinary day-in-the-life story, though I hear false fire alarms are pretty common here). Our entire lab was pretty annoyed, since some experiments are time-sensitive, and leaving the building for half an hour would mean re-doing the entire thing. My mentor assumed that the machinery must have broken, because there was a fire drill that morning as well. But I just found out that it was actually Nancy and Lavender's lab's fault. Thanks a lot guys. Just kidding, I still love you. Can you tell that I'm having an easy-breezy morning today?
ANYWAY, I'll stop now! Have an awesome day everyone!
