I am ready for a nap. Maybe ten naps. [rowing, crickets]

[rebeccmeister]

I managed to get myself out of bed to go rowing this morning. As usual, I'm glad I did. The wind was blowing up the BAP out of the south, as it often does, but the water was still nice enough for a good steady-state piece.

I'm continuing to work on my posture in the boat. A long while back, Iz had some useful feedback on how to think about it, and I've finally reached a stage where I can feel the feedback from my muscles when I'm doing things correctly vs. being sloppy. Good postural control at the finish/release makes for much smoother rowing and better preparation at the catch. It should also help smooth things between M's rowing style and mine.

The challenge is that I have to keep rowing with at least a minimal amount of consistency to hold onto improvements like this one. Days like Monday through Wednesday this week made that challenging, however, so I have to be satisfied taking what I can get.

-

Wednesday through today I have been dissecting the crickets from this week's inulin experiments. My primary goal is to determine the flight muscle status for the long-winged crickets (pink, active flight muscle or white, histolyzed flight muscle). My main focus is on the long-winged pink-muscled crickets because they are metabolically distinct from the short-winged white-muscled crickets.

But on any given day, the ratio of long-winged pink to long-winged white varies. For the 11 pm - 1 am timepoint, I had 7 pink and 1 white, so that timepoint is set. However, for the 11 am - 1 pm timepoint, I only had 2 pink and 8 white, and for the 8 pm - 10 pm timepoint I only have 1 pink and 7 white.

So I will need to redo two out of the three timepoints. Based on the current results, I'll set up long-winged to short-winged crickets at a ratio of 2:1.

These dissections have been very tedious and labor-intensive because in addition to checking the flight muscle status, I'm also dissecting out and weighing it, and also the crickets' ovaries and fat body. The ovaries are straightforward, but the fat body is a diffuse and sticky tissue that has to be gathered up.

Comments

[tylik]

What makes the white muscle white - less myoglobin? Finer strands?

[rebeccmeister]

A combination of factors, I think. Clearly, less myoglobin. Mass-specific respiration rates of white flight muscle are much lower than pink flight muscle.

But the white muscle is also generally WAY smaller than the pink muscle, and from crude visual inspection I'd say there's quite a bit of variation in white muscle - the most extreme cases tend to be in the short-winged crickets, which never grow more flight muscle.

The main thinking is that in formerly pink-muscled insects, the muscle gets histolyzed so the protein can be diverted into reproduction, but then at the same time, histolyzed muscle would require much less energy for maintenance, so there are energy savings as well.

I think the grad student in our lab is eventually going to have to do some microscopy work. For the time being, she's characterizing mitochondrial function.

[randomdreams]

I'll have you know I've been reading a lot about inulin lately, because of you.

[rebeccmeister]

I'm not surprised! It's interesting stuff, altogether.