The daily tasks that I did throughout the week was I got to clean the tanks and feed the whelks every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. This isn’t really a difficult task, but it can be time consuming with just one person. Also, it’s kind of hard without fresh water, only a salt water hose. Whelks are actually pretty interesting creatures, even with the slow movements. All of their intestines, blood and other body parts are all wrapped up into their shells. Their biggest predator is lobsters and crabs until the whelks get large enough. I have started an experiment (with my mentor, Shelley) to watch the eating habits of whelks in a tank and also in the wild. So we have a set up an experiment tank with five whelks, half a crab attached to a rock and a camera. That sounds like the beginning to a really bad joke. But we have recorded for several days and so my job for this next week is to watch those videos. Also Shelley has videos from the wild. So my other job is to count how many whelks have fallen into the special whelk cage.
Some challenges that I’ve faced already is trying to get the experiment to go correctly, and nothing happening to our camera set-up. The camera is lifted above the tank with a rope and zip-ties. We have needed to change the batteries twice now, and we can never put it back in the exact place as it was before. We have also changed our experiments slightly for each video; we moved the tank, only had five whelks instead of ten, wrote down where we put all the food, added a graph underneath the tank and lowered the water pressure. I have learned that science isn’t a perfect method. There will always be something that changes or just doesn’t work out.
It’s really exciting because I get to also work with other scientists. The lab is from UNH and is located on the Coast Guard base. Because it is the university’s lab, any science students can work there. There are dozens of experiments going on right now, including Shelleys. The only people who I have met are Nick and Nate. Nick is a guy who is working on growing fish food that has more protein so that the baby fish grow faster and also Nick has a really cute puppy. Nate is kind of the main guy at the lab, when I first saw him I thought he was in the military and I was so scared that he was going to make me do pushups. But he’s actually a really nice guy and has an interesting cursing vocabulary.
All in all. this has been a pretty great first week and I can't wait for the next two weeks!
Some challenges that I’ve faced already is trying to get the experiment to go correctly, and nothing happening to our camera set-up. The camera is lifted above the tank with a rope and zip-ties. We have needed to change the batteries twice now, and we can never put it back in the exact place as it was before. We have also changed our experiments slightly for each video; we moved the tank, only had five whelks instead of ten, wrote down where we put all the food, added a graph underneath the tank and lowered the water pressure. I have learned that science isn’t a perfect method. There will always be something that changes or just doesn’t work out.
It’s really exciting because I get to also work with other scientists. The lab is from UNH and is located on the Coast Guard base. Because it is the university’s lab, any science students can work there. There are dozens of experiments going on right now, including Shelleys. The only people who I have met are Nick and Nate. Nick is a guy who is working on growing fish food that has more protein so that the baby fish grow faster and also Nick has a really cute puppy. Nate is kind of the main guy at the lab, when I first saw him I thought he was in the military and I was so scared that he was going to make me do pushups. But he’s actually a really nice guy and has an interesting cursing vocabulary.
All in all. this has been a pretty great first week and I can't wait for the next two weeks!