Last week Christina and I got two Korean undergraduate research assistants named Chae-Hee and Hang-Ah. We took them out for two very sweaty days of hunting for water strikers in the mountain creeks as well as the ponds around campus. Hang-Ah had a lot of water strider catching potential… Chae-Hee struggled a bit, but she eventually caught a few! Thankfully this time I didn't fall into any ponds! On Friday, after finishing finalizing the setup of the research equipment, Christina and I met with Piotr and Sang-Im to discuss our research proposals/project for the remainder of our stay in Korea. I don't want to give too much detail away until the project is finished and ready to present, but we did go over the tracking of 12 total points per water strider video…this is a lot, but should give us very good data and eventual data analysis.
Instead of describing the research, (I probably won't go too into what's going on until after the summer is over after this point, we'll see…) I'd like to describe the lab environment here in Korea. Although I've never worked in a graduate lab before, the atmosphere seems to be very relaxed. At the moment there are three different research groups in our lab, a magpie group, varied tit, and water strider group. There is no real form of supervision, Piotr pops in every once in a while, but everyone works very diligently on their various projects. Now that the Korean school year is over, the lab is a lot more crowded with undergraduate helpers. I have never experienced this kind of individual research before this summer i.e. Designing, planning, and executing an entire project including learning the software necessary via online tutorials and spending weeks of trial and error finding the best methods to use in the experiment. Working in a graduate lab has been very illuminating!
Christina and I also helped Chelsea feed the frogs again this past week! Other than a slight slip of my hand in which a looooooooottttttt of fruit flies went into one of the frog tanks, the process was pretty easy and fun! I'm getting pretty good at tipping live fruit flies out of containers! Chelsea had ordered wingless fruit flies, but some had mutated wings and she was a little worried about the winged flies mating and filling her frog food with flying fruit flies… Which would be considerably harder to feed to the frogs haha. Speaking of frogs, we had a frog that I named Hector living in one of the sinks in our lab for the past few weeks… although I'm pretty sure he died this week :(. Chelsea is heading home to California for the next few weeks so I am not sure how much we will be helping the frog team in the future, we are also really busy with our water strider project!
That's it for research this week! See y'all next week!
Instead of describing the research, (I probably won't go too into what's going on until after the summer is over after this point, we'll see…) I'd like to describe the lab environment here in Korea. Although I've never worked in a graduate lab before, the atmosphere seems to be very relaxed. At the moment there are three different research groups in our lab, a magpie group, varied tit, and water strider group. There is no real form of supervision, Piotr pops in every once in a while, but everyone works very diligently on their various projects. Now that the Korean school year is over, the lab is a lot more crowded with undergraduate helpers. I have never experienced this kind of individual research before this summer i.e. Designing, planning, and executing an entire project including learning the software necessary via online tutorials and spending weeks of trial and error finding the best methods to use in the experiment. Working in a graduate lab has been very illuminating!
Christina and I also helped Chelsea feed the frogs again this past week! Other than a slight slip of my hand in which a looooooooottttttt of fruit flies went into one of the frog tanks, the process was pretty easy and fun! I'm getting pretty good at tipping live fruit flies out of containers! Chelsea had ordered wingless fruit flies, but some had mutated wings and she was a little worried about the winged flies mating and filling her frog food with flying fruit flies… Which would be considerably harder to feed to the frogs haha. Speaking of frogs, we had a frog that I named Hector living in one of the sinks in our lab for the past few weeks… although I'm pretty sure he died this week :(. Chelsea is heading home to California for the next few weeks so I am not sure how much we will be helping the frog team in the future, we are also really busy with our water strider project!
That's it for research this week! See y'all next week!