Week 6: Cleaning Chironomids and Midterm Presentations

This week was one of my busiest weeks at IEH. Now that I have collected all my chironomids from our various sampling sites, we need to begin our analysis projects. The first of these projects is the nitric acid digestion. However, before I can do any experiments, I need to clean the chironomids to make sure they don't have anything stuck to the outside of their bodies. Because we are doing a food web study, we only care about what is in the guts of the chironomids, so the cleaning step is critical. I also photographed every chironomid at 20x, using 4-8 pictures to capture chironomids, based on their size. The cleaning and picture taking process is slow but steady work, and I finished seven of my 9 samples this week. Hopefully I can finish up the last two on Monday so we can continue moving forward. 

As a preliminary step, however, I did begin a nitric acid digestion of a single chironomid from each of the May samples. The first step of the digestion is essentially letting the chironomid sit in nitric acid, and then neutralizing the solution. Over the weekend, hopefully the samples will settle and I will be able to get them onto slides on Monday. I am excited to see how it worked. We expect to see diatom frustules, but it's possible that we accidently sucked up any diatoms during the neutralization process, so I'm crossing my fingers and hoping for good results!

On Thursday of this week, all of the interns presented their projects for our midterm presentations. I was very pleased with my presentation and performance. I got some helpful feedback and many of the questions asked made me look at my work from a different angle. I also really enjoyed seeing my fellow interns present their work. Everyone did extremely well, and I look forward to the final symposium where I will be able to follow up with people on the progress of their research.