Playing With Fire, Dissecting Wasps, and the Hexapodium! It Is the End...

I don't have too much time, so I'll make this as concise as possible.

Today was the last day, and I'm dying on the inside... Even so, this was among the most fun days I've had in a while.

After doing one bit of culturing (harvesting Encarsia hispida, the one with wiggling pupae), I got to dissect some female E. emiratus wasps for their spermathecae. It's a really difficult process, actually. It involves taking two probes, using one to pin down the wasp's microscopic body, and the other to split it apart at the abdomen. The spermatheca is located in the back third of the abdomen, and is pretty delicate, so the preferred way to get it out is by removing that part of the abdomen from the whole wasp, and then ripping away the tissue surrounding the spermatheca. Once the organ is in the open, it's safe to take a closer look at the specimen under the compound microscope.

Next, I played with fire. That's right, they trust me with fire. Anyway, I used the fire in order to make some tools for the lab. As I mentioned before, dissections are done using probes, and the probes are just pipettor tips with tiny metal filaments inside/sticking out of them. To keep the filament inside, though, the tip of the pipettor tip needs to be melted, and the filament needs to be wedged inside that melted plastic before it hardens. Too often, the pipettor tip actually catches fire, so, yeah, the job isn't without its risks.

Ah, yes, at 5:30, there's an insect science-related event called the Hexapodium that's happening at the BIO5 building, and I get to go! One of the grad students from my lab (Joe Deas) is presenting his research on Mimosestes beetles and their adaptations against parasitism. I don't know what the other presentations are, but I know that the event consists of like, 6 presentations on insects by grad students exclusively. Afterward, there's a dinner, but I'm not gonna participate.

It's over.