In the lab
When Liam is gone and Matt doesn’t have another coworker to send me with, I go to the lab and work on sample processing. First: the sweaty but undeniably gorgeous bike ride. When I get to the lab, I take my next victim from the chest freezer that houses thousands upon thousands of chilly shrimp (quite dead, don’t worry) and pop the whole sealed bag in a pitcher of water to thaw while I set everything else up. I lay out a paper towel under my ruler since thawed shrimp can get a little drippy, I set up my many glass dishes, I set up a fresh data sheet on my clipboard, I fill up my water so I don’t forget to drink, I select my first podcast or video essay of the day, and I put on one glove. I dump all of the shrimp into a large dish. I copy down the sample sheet’s date, water temperature, salinity, oxygen content, and time. Once the data sheet is ready I start picking up clumps of shrimp, looking at each one individually under the microscope, and sorting them by species.
This part takes ten minutes on the high end. Then the long shraul: without the microscope, I pick out one shrimp at a time and measure its total body length and the length of its carapace (the head bit, minus the unicorn horn) and write those down. This part takes about an hour. I do four bags a day from about 9 AM to 4 PM. I’ve gone through so many podcasts and video essays. It’s a crazy-making slog in some ways, but I enjoy repetitive technical tasks and I have an eye for detail, so it’s actually more suited to my skills than I like to think too hard about.
Every two weeks for the last forty years, there’s been a seine. Three to six ish people drive out to the same spot at low tide, drag a giant net fifty feet up the creek, and go through everything they catch. My first seine bagged us eight gallons of shrimp and fish, and my second to last one bagged us more than ten, which overflowed our two five-gallon buckets and required us to carry some in the net like a horrible wiggling bag. We put the entire catch on ice and book it to the seawater lab (the air conditioned part, god bless) to sort, measure, and count. What counts as a “special” find depends on the time of year, and I watched the most common fish in my first seine become one that got put in its own separate container by the last one. (White mullet, if you’re wondering.) Once we caught a stingray about ten inches across. Several times we caught fish whose eyes were both on one side of the head, which is about the goofiest animal I’ve ever seen. We regularly catch tonguefish, which look about how they sound. This is not an appropriate place for the freaky red worms I’ve seen, since they live in the sediment and don’t get caught during seining, but it’s my blog and I can subject you to freaky worms if I want to.
Out the lab
I’ve been keeping pets. Oops. My roommate found a velvet ant (not an ant but a solitary and wingless wasp which absolutely stings) and we’ve called her Nellie, or Penelope when she’s in trouble. Her larvae would parasitize ground-dwelling bees, but as an adult she drinks a solution of one part honey to five parts water out of a bottlecap like a civilized woman. Also: the polyphemus moth eggs from blog 2 DID hatch, so every two days I fetch a new oak leaf from outside to tear up for my tiny caterpillars. I’ve been saying I wanted to raise moths again.
For the 4th, I hitched a ride with interns from the nearby Clemson lab to their beach party. I wasn’t dressed for it but I made do. It’s been the best 4th of July of my life so far, barely surpassing the only other 4th I spent on a beach watching people launch small rockets out over the water. We all went home smelling like firework smoke. It was magical.