Week 8

In the eighth week, my adviser asked me to stay at OIMB for one extra week, in order to polish up the website. I happily agreed, so I'll be here for a total of nine weeks. The website definitely needs a good deal of work so I am happy to put in more hours on it. Though to be honest, photo processing is exhausting work!

Most of this week was spent preparing for final presentations, which took place on Friday. I spent most of Tuesday reviewing notes on good ways to structure presentations. I gave a few practice presentations to my friends and felt ready to present on Friday. The presentations took place in a classroom at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology. Unfortunately the Hatfield Marine Science Center interns did not come down to Charleston for the day, but we did get the chance to see their presentations via Skype.

During my presentation, I spoke briefly about my future plans for the website (akiko-invertebrates.weebly.com), which I made to house the identification key which is my summer project. With my extra time at OIMB, I hope to label the basic anatomy of the juvenile settlers, and post a few photos of what each settler looks like as an adult colony. The website needs a lot of editing, and I have received many helpful comments about how to improve it. I hope that I have enough time to apply them all!




This is me looking through the dissecting microscope, which I used for the bulk of my work. Every day, for four weeks or so, I looked through this microscope to take pictures of the settling organisms.








A friend of mine took this photo of me and some ascidians. The large orange blobs are Distaplia occidentalis colonies, growing on a piece of netting that has been submerged for several months.

Week 6

The weeks have flown by! I have been hard at work. During the sixth week, I finally stopped taking daily photos of the settlers. It's fun to do work under the microscope, but hard when you're doing it every day! I compiled all of the photos I took (over 2,000!) and began sorting through them in order to find the highest quality ones for each species. Once I had chosen the nicest photographs, I began the long process of modifying them with Adobe Photoshop. Since I am new to both microscopy and photography, most of the pictures that I took were blurry, too dark, too bright or off-colored. Additionally, many of the organisms that I photographed are translucent, making them even harder to see on a picture. With Adobe Photoshop, I can adjust the photo to make the image clearer and more representative of the actual organism.

In addition to image quality modifications, I can also use Photoshop to create composites of multiple images. This is a very useful way to deal with the limitations of microscopy. With microscopes, the focal plane-- that is, how much of the object is in focus-- is very thin. This means that at any one time, only some parts of the 3D organism will be in focus. In any one picture, only a portion of the organism will be in focus and the rest of the organism will be blurry, as shown below. However, with Photoshop, I can slice out the parts from each picture that are in focus, and combine them together to make a composite image in which most of the organism appears to be in focus.

Here, the base of the organism is in focus.










Here, the top part of the organism is in focus.








This picture is a composite that I have made using Photoshop, by combining the two above images.






Photo processing takes a good deal of time to do, and I spent many hours going through the photos in order to get them cleaned up and presentable. In addition to that, I also began to learn how to make a website on using the "Weebly" website creation page. Thankfully, the interface on the Weebly page is very user-friendly. I am still ironing out the finer points of the web page but so far it is looking good! It is still under construction, but is viewable at: akiko-invertebrates.weebly.com .

Week 5

In the fifth week of the internship, all of the OIMB interns in Charleston and the Hatfield Marine Science Center interns from Newport got the chance to come together and show off our projects. The COSEE PRIME program makes a huge effort to support communication and collaboration among scientists, which is such a great initiative. Having spent many hours in the lab, I can see how a researcher could become so involved in their work that they don't get the chance to see what other scientists are doing in similar fields. However, collaboration is so important, because the results that you get under a microscope could heavily influence the work of another researcher doing a similar project.

On Wednesday, Coty and Drew came down to Charleston with their adviser Itchung. I showed them all my project and let them watch the little ascidians pump water into themselves. Every once in a while, the organisms will contract their branchial baskets and close their siphons as if they are coughing or exhaling. From what I've read, this is to keep large particles from entering their incurrent siphons. This reaction is touch-sensitive, so sometimes I will tickle the ascidian with a single hair (that's how small and sensitive they are) and watch them contract. Later on that afternoon, we all went out with Professor Jan Hodder to see some marine mammal action at Cape Arago. Seals and sea lions sunbathed on the rocks, and a few gray whales broke the surface every few minutes.

On Thursday, Karyn, Jess, and I with our adviser, Coral, went up to Newport to visit with the interns there and see their projects. This was the first day in over 3 weeks that I took a full day off and didn't look at my petri dishes! It was nice to have a little break and it gave me time to reflect on my project progression and to write in my research notebook. We got to stomp around in the mud with Drew, and visit Coty's bird-watching location. It was a nice trip, but good to come back home!

Playing around in the mud was fun. I got to use a huge siphon to suck shrimp out of the mud. We saw ghost shrimp and mud shrimp.
























We had a blast looking at marine mammals at Cape Arago!