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rebeccmeisterToday was the day before spring "break," wherein I administered the first of two midterm exams. Students reported they had a lot of exams this week, which we all agreed was not ideal but better than trying to have an exam immediately after spring break.
Since my afternoon office hours were very quiet, I was able to spend a good part of the afternoon working on data entry for a project that two of my current three research students are working on. We are looking at what happens to worker ant body sizes as leafcutter colonies get older and larger, comparing colonies headed up by two queens to colonies headed up by groups of six queens. Since starting those colonies back in the summer of 2024, students and I have periodically gone through and collected out the colonies' trash piles, which contain all of the dead workers - a noninvasive way to examine adult ant body sizes.
Cataloguing what has been done with the colonies since their establishment led me to realize we'd overlooked a set of samples that could be particularly informative to include. So although I was quite tired, in the last 30 minutes of the day, I finally located the samples and started to get them ready for measurements.
It is much more fun and rewarding to apply ant heads to a piece of double-sided sticky tape for the purpose of measuring how big they are than it is to grade exams, so most likely that's what I'll work on for the first part of the day on Monday.
Since my afternoon office hours were very quiet, I was able to spend a good part of the afternoon working on data entry for a project that two of my current three research students are working on. We are looking at what happens to worker ant body sizes as leafcutter colonies get older and larger, comparing colonies headed up by two queens to colonies headed up by groups of six queens. Since starting those colonies back in the summer of 2024, students and I have periodically gone through and collected out the colonies' trash piles, which contain all of the dead workers - a noninvasive way to examine adult ant body sizes.
Cataloguing what has been done with the colonies since their establishment led me to realize we'd overlooked a set of samples that could be particularly informative to include. So although I was quite tired, in the last 30 minutes of the day, I finally located the samples and started to get them ready for measurements.
It is much more fun and rewarding to apply ant heads to a piece of double-sided sticky tape for the purpose of measuring how big they are than it is to grade exams, so most likely that's what I'll work on for the first part of the day on Monday.
