Chemosensory Biology

Fall 2009. BUMP #1. Block 2.

Crabs. The invasive green crab C. maenas in fact. I spent this entire block working with crabs and one of the best research teams I've ever been a part: Jaimie (below), Ariel, and me.  We did a series of training experiments that I'll get to later, but we spent 9-5 in a dark, cold room running trials on about 30 crabs for a month solid. 

This is what our experimental design looked like, we sat side by side and ran individual trials in separate containers. (Don't worry, we rotated crabs to eliminate bias and any individual differences).

This is what we saw inside the buckets. We sectioned the buckets into 9 squares and selected at random which square we originally placed the crabs. The gist of the experiment was this: crabs do not like light. In fact, most stay in dark covered places for most of their lives. We also had access to this local invasive species. Knowing that 1. Crabs have shown learning capabilities in previous experiments and 2. Successful invasive species are usually very intelligent/can outcompete local species, we wanted to see if we could train this species of crab to approach a light in order to receive food. As the name of this class was chemosensory biology, we designed our trials by eliminating sensory cues one by one until the crabs made it to stage 4 successfully completing our experiment. The protocol went like this- 

Stage 1-crabs see a piece of food dropped into the bucket, and we pipetted a flume of the scent at the crabs. Once the crabs retrieved the food we shone a light on them

Stage 2-same thing, except the light is on the food for the whole trial

Stage 3-food dropped in, no scent pipetted (so only visual cue) and continual light beam

Stage 4- shone only light beam into the container, once approached center of the beam we dispensed food

Our professor was very encouraging, but made it clear that he did not really expect anything from our experiment. Much to everyone's surprise we had a very high % complete our experimental design. 

You can see an example of a trial HERE.

(be warned, we got excited while taping and talked some, our trials were always silent during experimentation)

Just some fun facts about crabs: to determine sex just look at the underside or abdomen! Male is on the left with the narrower shape, female on the right with the wider markings. 

We compared the results between three different factors of the crabs; their sex M v. F, their background lab raised v. wild caught, and their size small carapace length v. large carapace length (below)

In the end we made some marine inspired cookies that we shared with the class.

And here is our award winning (well, peer voted best in class)  poster :)

Estuaries and Nearshore Ecology

Fall 2009. BUMP #1. Block #1. Three words come to mind: Sergio, mud, and samples. This course was taught by Sergio Fagherazzi and his TF Guilio, both of whom are beyond Italian. The strong accents lead to many an entertaining conversation and estuaries was by far the most fun-loving class I've ever taken. I mean, c'mon, how can you not love this guy?

The class was based completely within the Plum Island Sound LTER (Long Term Ecological Research)http://ecosystems.mbl.edu/pie/. The general idea is that Rowley, MA is mostly covered in marsh making it ideal for the LTER. One area of marsh was left completely natural- there is very minimal human influence and is as close to pristine as possible. Another marsh nearby gets continuos pumping of N and P at a rate calculated to be equivalent to average anthropogenic runoff. The two sites are then compared over short and long time spans under the hypothesis that the marsh exposed to the excess pollutants will erode at a faster rate and eventually begin to collapse in on itself.

I managed to make a great first impression; just a few minutes into our first class I stumbled into the marsh. Please note everyone behind me pointing and laughing, a memory we still cherish.

The class was split into four groups. One worked on channels and another on scarp as pictured below. They were literally in wetsuits every day standing in the channels completely covered in mud. They recorded the height and slopes of predetermined sample sites which were eventually compared to the class's  findings from the previous year. 

The third group, dunes, recorded vegetation plots, percentage cover and species ID's of plants in the surrounding dune ecosystem. They were also looking at erosional changes and differences in plant species dominance from the previous year.

Below is one of the field stations where we would commute to everyday; note the white BU van.

I was in the fourth group, cores, or as we were eventually known: team hard core. Enter Finzi lab experience. The site coordinators wanted to try a new sampling technique analyzing the quality of salt marsh soil by taking cores and comparing the treated v. control marsh. The only problem was they had never done it before and most of them were ecologists with limited terrestrial background. Since I had just spent a year of my life getting acquainted with soil cores I showed them the standard techniques for forest ecology and kick-started our intensive field block. We took 36 50cm soil core samples which were divided into zones, each of which was picked for root, rhizome, and detritus biomass. We also took C,H,N samples for later isotope analysis and took plant samples for above ground biomass.

Some of the sites were much more excluded than others, one of our dear friends (Sweeney) was over the river...

and through the woods...

 (That's our team below! I'm holding the core sampler over my shoulder)

By the time it was all over many mistakes had been made, some cores were retaken, and we eventually worked through 998 samples. We didn't just take that many, all those sections were handpicked and analyzed which is pretty ridiculous for four college students in less than a month. It's truly more processing than some labs accomplish in an entire year so estuaries was definitely a class close to my heart. There were even samples left at the end and a few of us were asked to stay on to completely finish the processing; not bad to have these guys on your resume: Woods Hole

Please note that it's pitch black outside that window, I think it was about 11:30.

We still had our fun at the field site. Here are two Europeans (L-Giulio, Italy R-Christina, France) having their first ever s'more. They liked it but said it would have been better with dark chocolate.

And during the process some equipment malfunctioned, here is me taking my anger out on an oven that kept burning our samples to crisps (rendering them worthless).

I mean, you've got to be a little crazy sometimes or you'd drive yourself completely mad.

BUMP

So... the B.U. Marine Program (BUMP: http://www.bu.edu/bump/) is why I chose to attend BU. All marine science majors are required to complete one marine semester-- some crazier people like me and three close friends signed up for it twice. This is how it works: instead of taking all of your classes simultaneously you take one class at a time, each four weeks long, eventually totaling 4 blocks per semester. Sounds easy right? I mean you're only in one class...?

What they don't tell you in the recruitment pamphlet is that you are committed to BUMP 24/7 for an entire semester and if you have other plans than that's too bad and you better cancel everything stat. You take a fast-tracked lecture course, must complete all required field work for the class, and then can start an extensive individualized research project which will be completed, analyzed, and interpreted within the four weeks. Each block acts as a mini graduate-level thesis and the point is very clear: you can either handle this now or a research career is not right for you.

Some run to the hills, some survive but decide to forgo grad school, and a few of us decide to live, eat, and breathe it until we physically can't anymore.

Finzi Lab: Forest Biogeochemistry and the beginning stages of my science nerd transformation

I never knew that root picking would turn out to be one of the most useful science skills I've ever learned. It is exactly what it sounds like: you take a soil core sample (a.k.a. pile of dirt) and use tweezers to pick out root and rhizome biomass. It is pretty tedious, fairly boring, and is best done in the presence of a great lab team and loud music. Soil core analysis turned out to be a skill that served me well later in BUMP (more later) and I still owe this lab a huge thank you for letting me be a part of their summer 2008 field team.

Finzi lab is what first got me hooked on the life of a researcher (http://www.bu.edu/biology/people/faculty/finzi/). Sure, I had to do a lot of the 'grunt' work such as washing dishes and pipetting standards but I also got my hands on some pretty cool science that summer. We backpacked Mt. Eisenhower, NH collecting soil cores and treating in-ground cores with isotopic nitrogen, nitrite and nitrate. The combination of being in the field, physical labor, and science really worked for me. Even though I was a marine focus I realized I had stumbled upon the type of thing I wanted to be doing in the future.  I spent that summer in either the field or the lab in Boston where I got a bunch of lab techniques under my belt. This is one of the best work environments I've ever been in and I continued to volunteer throughout my entire sophomore year.