Wasp Stuff is slowly winding down...

Well, I'm going to remind all of you that the stuff that goes on in the Hunter lab is on a weekly cycle, so if I did something one week, chances are I'll do it the next week, at the same time, even. Now, I'd also like to mention that even though my powers of rhetoric can't convey the pure joy lacing my thoughts in words, I really, really enjoy working at that lab. Eight hours feel like eight minutes!!!

Contrary to the first of the above statements, I did do something a little different this week. So, yesterday, for the first time in my eight weeks at the lab, I did a harvest of Encarsia formosa pupae. Harvests are done by removing cowpea leaves that contain parasitized whitefly larvae from plants in jars, and transferring them to another jar (known as the emergence jar), where the developing wasps will emerge from the husks of their hosts a few days later. Anyway, the cool thing about Encarsia formosa pupae is that while the wasps themselves are black-bodied with yellow abdomens (this describes the females, but since this is a parthenogenetic species, there are no males), the color of their pupae is like a cream and brown marbled pattern. Today, the lab was only down to one volunteer--ME! So I had to do three harvests (Encarsia pergandiella, Eretmocerus eremicus, and Eretmocerus emiratus), as well as an Eretmocerus emiratus infestation (infestation is the process of sucking up wasps into a tube, and placing that tube into a jar with a cowpea plant containing whiteflies on it). This was actually not a whole lot of work, so between the harvests and infestation, I watered some un-jarred cowpea plants that are sustaining a whitefly culture, and I created some primers by taking the concentrated stuff and watering it down. Also, and I didn't participate in this, (I was there, though) but the lab worked on an enormous gradient PCR to test whether or not the machine functioned. The machine functions, but not all of our 96 DNA samples behaved for us, as evidenced by the weird gel electrophoresis results.

Oh yes, I'm getting a day off tomorrow, and most of the day off Thursday. My first full day off ever!!! Maybe I'll use it to write some stuff or read some stuff, or maybe I'll sleep until noon and not assume a standing position until I have to forage for food. We'll see how it goes...