there was some lady in the lab today filming one of the projects. i think it was for a local news channel? i don't know. i just met the main guy working on the project (officially) today, though. he's another mark. there are like six marks in the aquatics building or some shit.
his project is really cool though! a couple of years ago, the kingston coal plant (which is near here) broke and released a ridiculous amount of fly ash. fly ash is bad shit. it's one of the byproducts of coal power and it's full of heavy metals and toxins. this fly ash got into one of the water ways. because there's so much crap in the ash, one would assume that it's fucking up the aquatic system of the water way. that's not the cool part though.
mark has been exposing fathead minnows to fly ash and seeing the effects of ash on their reproduction. he collects minnow eggs and records the number and qualities of eggs and compares them to the eggs of normal fathead minnows. i heard him talking to logan about some of the logistics of their project, and it seems super interesting! /geek out
i'm using fathead minnows for my current project too. apparently they're the "white mice" of aquatics research, which i did not know. they're cute little fish, but super skittish. every time i go near my tank of minnows, they all spaz out like crazy.
unfortunately, they're not all that smart either. one of mine got caught in a metal mesh and ripped a big hole in his side. i didn't really know what to do with the poor guy, so i asked one of the lab techs and she promptly fed him to a bigger fish. and that was that.
today was a bit terrible. i fucked up on a couple of things with my experiment, although i managed to fix the problems i had caused. it was just disappointing, is all. and i'm getting pretty sick of staring at a computer screen and recording fish locations for hours and hours. it's not so fun, but somebody's got to do it. and i'm enjoying looking at the data for trends after i've done all of that bitch work!
i don't think i've actually described my current experiment yet. it'll have to wait.
No comments:
Post a Comment