Something Different is Happening with the Wasps!!

So, for the past few weeks, my experiment over at the Hunter lab has consisted of repeating the same kind of experiment with four different test groups, with one test group per week. Basically, things went like this: on Mondays, we made wasps mate; on Tuesdays, we created leaf dishes and thinned out the number of whitefly larvae contained on the dishes; on Wednesdays, we put mated female wasps on those leaf dishes; on Thursdays, we collected those wasps and flipped over half of the whitefly larvae to check for wasp eggs underneath; on Fridays, we isolated wasp pupae for the next week's block of experiments and infested whitefly-covered plant with wasps to keep the culture alive. The whiteflies we worked with were the silverleaf whitefly (Rickettsia-negative), and the wasps were Eretmocerus emiratus (all Rickettsia-negative and either Wolbachia-positive or Wolbachia-negative). After four weeks of this, the leaf dish part of the experiment was over, so now, we're gonna do some different stuff relating to my experiment.

Since that stuff is all over, my days at the lab will involve doing some culturing for any of the wasp species at the lab (if you'll recall, the lab has microscopic parasitoid wasps in either the genus Encarsia or Eretmocerus, and between the genera, there are six species, and multiple populations of each, some from foreign countries), or doing some DNA extractions and PCR-stuff with the wasps from the experiment (we kept and froze all of the wasps we used for the experiment in a -80 degree Celsius freezer). Today, I did a little bit of both. First, I harvested some Cardinium-negative, Wolbachia-positive Encarsia inaron wasps and then did some DNA extractions on various other E. inaron wasps (this wasn't for my experiment, but for practice and for other lab experiments).

So anyway, that was my day. It was finally something different than what we had been doing for the past month (although I did have fun this past month, don't get me wrong). Also, it looks like I may be getting some days off in the near future. Sounds exciting!