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Charlotte Heacock - Week One


After traveling for the past month I finally arrived in Townsville Australia and just finished my first week in the lab! I could not be happier with how things have been going. Three grad students from my lab came to the airport to pick me up when I arrived and it made me happier than you could ever imagine. I had a couple of days to settle in to my Airbnb and I was welcomed with the eight puppies that my roommate is raising.

I was introduced to the people working in Dr. Michelle Heupel’s lab during “Monday Morning Tea Time”. There are about twelve people total. Three male PI’s, one female, seven female grad students and one male. It was also pretty cool to see that most of the lab was female. After morning tea, Michelle and her husband (one of the male PI’s) took me on a tour of the campus and helped me get settled in. I am working closely with two grad students, one of whom is working with the Global Finprint project that Michelle and her husband are a part of, and the other is just beginning her research in to the age, growth, and life history of wedgefish.

Each morning I watch around two to three hour and a half long underwater video surveys, which were taken off the coast of Orpheus, an island north of Townsville. The videos were taken using bruvs (baited remote underwater video surveys) and there are thousands of videos that were collected from reefs around the world and are being watched and analyzed by students at James Cook University (where my lab is located). We use a program made specifically for this global project and we time stamp and categorize the species, sex, and feeding behavior of each shark, ray, eel, or turtle that enters the screen. Some videos are far more active than others where you may see three different species in the frame at a time whereas others can have about two feet of visibility and you sit there and watch sand move for an hour and a half. Although this work is tedious and can sometimes seem irrelevant is it vital to the conservation and data collection of elasmobranchs around the world.

After lunch I am stationed in a wet lab where I am cleaning and sequencing wedge fish vertebrae. This is also tedious work because some of the vertebra are about the size of a grain of rice and if you press down too hard on the scalpel, that specimen and potential data is ruined. I begin by removing the notochord and putting it in a labeled vile with ethanol so that it can sequenced for DNA and then I remove all of the excess muscle tissue and cartilage until I see the hourglass shaped vertebrae. I then separate each one and put them all in a labeled tube. There are about 150 vertebrae that I am currently working my way through. After this I will bake them and slice them so that they can be looked at under a microscope to determine the age by counting the calcification lines, almost like you would age a tree. Then comes the math and modeling where I will put all of the data in to a graph so that different species can be aged by just looking at their size and the species can be conserved and managed better by enforcing more conservation of the slow growth and maturing fish so that they do not die out do to overfishing.  I love doing the work but boy does it smell. I leave the lab everyday smelling like fourteen-year-old defrosting shark which is a very specific and unpleasant scent. So far it as been an adventure and I can't wait to get back to work. I’m definitely still learning a lot about Australia and below I have listed some of the new terms I’ve learned and the adventures I have had so far. But don’t worry, there is more to come…


Adventures
-       getting lost at least once  day
-       walking 2 miles back home with my all my groceries
-       going on what I though was going to be an easy hike but ended up turning in to a rock climb up the side of a mountain
-       having a women at the aquarium point to a back tip reef shark and say “look it’s a white tip”
-       Carrying around about $35 in coins because they are so heavy and confusing  

             Vocab
-       Sunnies – sunglasses
-       Arvo – afternoon
-       Thongs – flipflops
-       Straya - Australia
-       Lift – elevator
-       Maccas –McDonalds
-       Floor 0 – 1st floor
-       How ya goin’ – hi, how are you, hello
-       Brekky – breakfast
-       Bloody – very
-       Good on ya – good work
-       Footy – weird Australia game that is a mix of volleyball, soccer, quidditch football and rugby
-       Servo – gas station
-       Kindy – kindergarten
-       Uni – college/university
























                                                                   
























                                                                                              


















  
            
        
   
    
 

Comments

  1. UnknownJuly 22, 2018 at 5:39 PM

    Thank you for your Vocab! Are you near Gemma? She is back home and would probably love to see a Peddie face in her homeland. Good luck with the sequencing - steady hands!

    ReplyDelete

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