Nothing huge to report this week! Monday and Tuesday were dedicated to getting the lab prepped for a field sampling trip to Tillamook Bay on Wednesday. That mostly involved labeling lots of sample bags/bottles and filling a plethora of tubes with 0.3g of glass beads to be used in DNA extractions next week. Although the work is fairly tedious it does payoff to get to spend a whole morning out on the water! The sampling actually went well this time and the hovercraft didn’t have any terminal malfunctions until the very last sample site. We were able to collect water, nutrient, sediment, and eelgrass samples from 7 sites in all. The down side of getting that many sites is that it takes an obscene amount of time to process the samples when we get back to the lab that afternoon. Overall, it was a 14hr day once we got the water filtered and the sediment and eelgrass rinsed. On the bright side I only had half days on Thursday and Friday so there was some time to catch up on sleep and go for a run! I spent those days scraping epiphytes off of eelgrass leaves and preparing samples for moisture content analysis. All things considered it was a good week in the office!

The big event this week that has been on my mind is that I’ve decided, with the support of my school mentor and Amy, to rework a research paper I authored last fall into a publishable manuscript. On my semester abroad with the School for Field Studies in the Turks and Caicos, BWI I spent a month doing my own research on the interactions of two groups of indicator species (2 Acroporid corals, A. palmata and A. cervicornis, and the long-spined sea urchin, Diadema antillarum). I ended up finding some interesting relationships between these three species and I would love to have this work published in Marine Ecology Progress Series. I know this is going to be a long road but I’m not too stressed (which is VERY unusual for me haha). I’ve already done all the heavy lifting so I just need to rerun some statistics, generate better figures, do general editing, and reformat the manuscript. My current plan is to ask a professor at UCSD to co-author with me and have them help me with the process. Who knows, it might just work out!