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Week 5: Lots of Sampling!

This week started off with a whirlwind of sampling! I spent all of Monday sampling from our Welch Island and Whites Island sampling sites. It was very exciting to see the sites we collect from to obtain the samples I have been working with. Claudia worked with researchers from NOAA to collect samples, and I processed them out in the field, which was both exciting a somewhat scary because I was processing the samples alone and didn't want to do anything wrong. Fortunately, all the processing went smoothly, and we were able to get all the necessary information from both our sites. Samples of particular interest to me were the vegetation tows, which I would then pick through for chironomids later in the week. 

Tuesday was much the same, as we continued our sampling at Campbell Slough and Franz Lake. We had complete success at Campbell Slough, and I was able to get a great vegetation tow. Unfortunately, the water levels were too low to get a vegetation tow at Franz Lake. This was disapointing because we have yet to get a vegetation tow from Franz Lake, and since the sampling for this summer is over, we will not be able to include it in any experiments or analysis. 

The rest of the week was dedicated to picking through my three vegetation tows from Whites Island, Welch Island, and Campbell Slough. I had great success with all three of the samples, and we should have plenty of Chironomids for both our nitric acid digestions and also for DNA extractions for pyro sequencing. 

I am very excited to move forward with my project involving the nitric acid digestion next week, and also to begin prepping for DNA extractions in later weeks.