It'll Be a Brutal Tuesday for the Wasps and for Me...

Well, another week, but this time, not an easy one!!! Don't let the fact that I got out at 2:30 fool you, today was one of the most frustrating days I've had in a while with those little wasps.

So, the "secret" part of my experiment over at the Hunter lab has now begun. Today, we did competitive mating experiments on my population of Eretmocerus emiratus wasps that I isolated last week. They've had a while to develop, and today, they were ready to get some action...or so we hoped. Suzanne had an easier time with it than I did, but it was still very difficult to get these things to behave. The process goes like this: take a Wolbachia-negative female wasp and place her on a leaf dish; then take two males, one W+, and one W-, and put them in the same small glass vial; once they're comfortably settled in, tap them into the leaf dish and spy on them as they try to mate with the female. In an ideal world, each male would get his chance with the female, and after being rejected or accepted, would go away so that he can be safely aspirated into a pipette and stored for DNA extraction later.

Unfortunately, that's not how it goes...the males don't like to be transferred from one vial to another, or transferred at all, so as soon as they get the chance, they'll escape, especially if they land on the leaf dish and don't notice the female, so, yeah, they're jerks. Assuming both males make it onto the leaf dish and see the female and aren't injured from the transfer (which happened to me maybe like, 4 times out of 9), they'll try to mate with her. Since this is competitive, the male that isn't currently in the process of mating with the female will go over and break it up, typically resulting in a hilarious 3-way wrestling match that ends when the female has had enough. This is assuming they even notice the female. When they don't, they will aimlessly wander in the dish for 10 minutes at a time before trying to approach the female, who can still effectively kick unwanted suitors away for another five minutes. That's still not the worst scenario, though. Wasps like it humid, and if they're left out for too long, they'll get thirsty, and spend 10 minutes just drinking agar once they arrive in the dish, which keeps them from noticing the female, and when they do notice her, she's typically cranky from being so thirsty. This must not sound like a fun thing, right? WRONG! If the results we want are the results we get, this will be quite an important discovery.

Oh, but onto the stuff I mentioned in the title...tomorrow, there are no undergrad workers coming in to help us with culturing, so in addition to that stuff, we'll be doing another primer-testing PCR and more matings. We're gonna do so much stuff tomorrow that we'll deserve medals if we survive...

Happy trails, y'all.