Microscopy

I am in one of those states where I have about 5 different projects I could be working on, none of which is a clear priority, and so much of my mental energy is devoted to deciding which project to work on. So I have decided to spend some time working on collecting follow-up data from two earlier projects. The first project is now four years old, and involves outlining the areas of a set of fungus gardens from colonies that did not survive their first six months of life. So it's a clickety-click-click task. The second project is two and a half years old, and involves collecting a lot of basic biomass measurements--in this case, it involves counting up the number of microscopic larvae present in fungus gardens. I would liken this task to something along the lines of digging tiny, fragile raisins out of cotton candy. Tedious, yes. I spent all day yesterday finishing just one colony and obtaining just a single number. Hopefully I will soon reach a stage where I can really dig in and finish up the data analysis so I can then turn to writing the results up for publication.

But in the meantime, for the next week or so, I am spending a lot of time in front of a dissecting microscope. It's quite unfortunate that our lab's dissecting microscope does not have the same optical quality as the scopes in the lab next door. The optical quality is such that I have to take periodic breaks, or I start to go crazy because of the extra work my visual system must go through to process the image in front of me. On the other hand, the breaks are also beneficial for my neck and shoulders; one should not spend too many extended periods hunched forward and peering through a microscope.

And on that note, time to get back to work.