Done-o-saurus
Feb. 21st, 2014 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rebeccmeisterThis morning, I woke up at 5, got out of bed at 5:20 (what can I say, the cat was heavy), erged, showered, made coffee and lunch, biked over to Blue Baker for Bike-Friendly Fridays (photographic evidence), then went in to work.
I then spent way too long working on a problem of mine and made some reasonable progress after spending a bit of time learning my way around the source code for the R function I've been using. That was good in that it stretched my brain a bit, but bad in that it ate up way too much time. And also, I still don't have a satisfactory final product. The trouble is that I anticipate that I'll want to create about 30-40 of these figures in total over the lifespan of the cricket project, so I want to make the figure-creation process less fiddly and yet still result in publication-worthy figures. Otherwise I can anticipate having to spend too much time mouse-clicking, and I am so over that (see: undergrad thesis and fungus-tracing in grad school).
Once I ran out of time and steam on that project, it was time to do some cricket work. I'd hoped to have finished the stage of feeding-food-to-crickets-and-weighing-them last fall, but unfortunately when I finally sat down to look at the data, I discovered I'd need more long-winged individuals.
The problem is that not all long-winged crickets are equal. While some individuals are flight-capable and have pink flight muscles (tiny, juicy cricket steaks!), others have degenerated white flight muscles and cannot fly. We are only interested in the LW-pink, not the cryptic LW-white, for the sake of comparison with the short-winged, flightless crickets (who also have white flight muscles). The LW-white crickets are a vague intermediate for our purposes at the moment.
So anyway. After I wrapped up the last round of feeding trials, there was a lag between the conclusion of the feeding and dissection of the crickets to assess their flight muscle condition. To my horror, I've learned that way more of the LW crickets are white-muscled than I had anticipated. So, back to the laboratory to feed and dissect more crickets.
I'm kind of in a hurry by now. This project needs to be wrapped up. So I'm dissecting crickets every day to speed things along. At least 8 crickets a day. Altogether, it only takes about an hour and a half, but it's a pretty intense period, staring at tiny things through the dissecting scope. Gives me the five-micrometer stare for a while.
Hopefully I'll manage to take some photos of the process. The process is rather gruesome, given that it involves cutting open a cricket and pulling out her insides, but at the same time, it's cool in the sense that it's a chance to learn how cricket guts all fit together. And yeah, the pink flight muscle really does look meaty, while the white flight muscle looks about like how you'd expect muscle to look in a couch potato. At least, in the cricket case, the flabby flight muscles tend to be offset by giant ovaries and not by huge fat deposits.
Oh, then.
Then I worked on some modifications to one cricket manuscript, where we're reporting on experiments where we measured cricket metabolic rates, and sent that over to my boss-man. And then I worked on modifications to another cricket manuscript, associated with the work described above. And then I biked over to another building to water our lab's wheatgrass (fed to the lab's grasshopper collection), then home, dinner, and a couple of hours working on the next leafcutter manuscript.
Tomorrow's looking like this:
Get up at 6:40, have breakfast and make lunch, bike out to Lake Bryan, help with sprint races, bike back to town, get groceries at Brazos Natural Foods, head in to the lab for a couple of hours, come home, fall in a heap. Maybe do some laundry, I hope? Maybe cook some food, I hope? And more of the same on Sunday.
I then spent way too long working on a problem of mine and made some reasonable progress after spending a bit of time learning my way around the source code for the R function I've been using. That was good in that it stretched my brain a bit, but bad in that it ate up way too much time. And also, I still don't have a satisfactory final product. The trouble is that I anticipate that I'll want to create about 30-40 of these figures in total over the lifespan of the cricket project, so I want to make the figure-creation process less fiddly and yet still result in publication-worthy figures. Otherwise I can anticipate having to spend too much time mouse-clicking, and I am so over that (see: undergrad thesis and fungus-tracing in grad school).
Once I ran out of time and steam on that project, it was time to do some cricket work. I'd hoped to have finished the stage of feeding-food-to-crickets-and-weighing-them last fall, but unfortunately when I finally sat down to look at the data, I discovered I'd need more long-winged individuals.
The problem is that not all long-winged crickets are equal. While some individuals are flight-capable and have pink flight muscles (tiny, juicy cricket steaks!), others have degenerated white flight muscles and cannot fly. We are only interested in the LW-pink, not the cryptic LW-white, for the sake of comparison with the short-winged, flightless crickets (who also have white flight muscles). The LW-white crickets are a vague intermediate for our purposes at the moment.
So anyway. After I wrapped up the last round of feeding trials, there was a lag between the conclusion of the feeding and dissection of the crickets to assess their flight muscle condition. To my horror, I've learned that way more of the LW crickets are white-muscled than I had anticipated. So, back to the laboratory to feed and dissect more crickets.
I'm kind of in a hurry by now. This project needs to be wrapped up. So I'm dissecting crickets every day to speed things along. At least 8 crickets a day. Altogether, it only takes about an hour and a half, but it's a pretty intense period, staring at tiny things through the dissecting scope. Gives me the five-micrometer stare for a while.
Hopefully I'll manage to take some photos of the process. The process is rather gruesome, given that it involves cutting open a cricket and pulling out her insides, but at the same time, it's cool in the sense that it's a chance to learn how cricket guts all fit together. And yeah, the pink flight muscle really does look meaty, while the white flight muscle looks about like how you'd expect muscle to look in a couch potato. At least, in the cricket case, the flabby flight muscles tend to be offset by giant ovaries and not by huge fat deposits.
Oh, then.
Then I worked on some modifications to one cricket manuscript, where we're reporting on experiments where we measured cricket metabolic rates, and sent that over to my boss-man. And then I worked on modifications to another cricket manuscript, associated with the work described above. And then I biked over to another building to water our lab's wheatgrass (fed to the lab's grasshopper collection), then home, dinner, and a couple of hours working on the next leafcutter manuscript.
Tomorrow's looking like this:
Get up at 6:40, have breakfast and make lunch, bike out to Lake Bryan, help with sprint races, bike back to town, get groceries at Brazos Natural Foods, head in to the lab for a couple of hours, come home, fall in a heap. Maybe do some laundry, I hope? Maybe cook some food, I hope? And more of the same on Sunday.
