Attack of the Microscopes!!! Featuring Wasps in the Mood

We'll see if I can keep this short, since there's not too much new stuff going on. The main thing that IS happening is the official start of my project, since up until now, it's been practice and miscellaneous lab work...

So, yesterday, most of the day was spent harvesting Eretmocerus emiratus pupae from a Wolbachia-positive, and a Wolbachia-negative culture (Wolbachia, of course, is a bacterial symbiont of E. emiratus wasps). I personally isolated 57 Wolbachia-positive (W+) wasps from approximately five leaves, while the rest of the team worked on isolating another culture of W+ wasps, and while the lab's research director (Suzanne Kelley) worked on isolating the W- wasps. To give you an idea of how good she is, I can tell you that she isolated the same amount of wasps as I and two undergrads did. Amazing! Oh, by the way, one of the undergrads is an alum of BASIS Scottsdale, but since she left after 10th grade, I'll try to keep the hostility to a minimum. Okay, so in total, maybe around 80 or 90 W+ wasps were isolated, and about 100 W- wasps were isolated. Quite a productive day indeed, except for the fact that all of the microscope work screwed up my vision for the rest of the day.

Today, the most important discovery concerned the discovery of the mating preferences of E. emiratus. If you'll recall a previous post, I made a mention of how difficult it was for us to get the E. emiratus wasps to mate inside glass vials. Anyway, it turns out that they'll mate almost instantly if they're placed onto leaf discs. A leaf disc is a circular leaf segment made from cutting up a leaf with an X-Acto knife and placing it into a small Petri dish. So yeah, not 2 minutes after being placed on the leaf disc, the wasps began to mate, and then 2 minutes after that, the females began to oviposit under the whitefly larvae. Another interesting thing that we may have discovered is that W+ wasps may develop into adults faster than W- wasps. This is still a theory, but judging by the rate of growth of our most recent W+ culture, it seems feasible. Also, I saw Matt Balanda today, and apparently, Josh Albertson saw me.