One of the main goals of scientists is to communicate their findings. They are able to do this by publishing papers of their work. Stacy is currently spending lots of time editing and preparing her paper to be published! 

The lab recently attended the 45th annual Benthic Ecology Meeting located in Portland, Maine. This meeting occurs yearly allowing scientists to exchange information on benthic ecosystems and to encourage the next generation of benthic biologists.

Stacy presented an oral presentation on her newly published paper Unconscious uncoupling: invasion of novel habitats disrupts haploid-diploid life cycles.

 Paige and Sarah presented their research at the poster session. 
Paige's poster was titled Are introduced populations of the seaweed ​Gracilaria​​ vermiculophylla ​more resistant to herbivores  than native  populations?  A test of post ­invasion adaptation.

Sarah presented  The  Role  of  Heat  Tolerance  in  the  Invasive  Success  of the Red  Seaweed ​Gracilaria  vermiculophylla 

Glauco is hard at work tweaking the methodology for his feeding assays as mentioned in our last post! He is currently measuring out samples that will be used to study the diet of amphipods. 

The whole Sotka Lab is on spring break this week. All except for Glauco! Glauco has been busy redesigning his experiment methodology. Sometimes scientists will start an experiment, and it does not always turn out accordingly. So what do they do? They don't give up, they try again! Glauco set up a feeding assay for herbivores using an artificial food source. The herbivores did not eat the fake food, so he will be redesigning the same experiment using the real deal... seaweed! 

Too much light?

Last week the Science Spotlight crew stopped by the lab and heard that many Gracilaria specimens being cultured in the wetlab had died off.
One idea is that they received too much light. Huh? It's true, folks. Too much light, especially in an artificial environment can be bad for algae or plants.

Remember the scientific method? Well... that part about analysis can be a big portion of what a scientist does after running an assay, or experiment. Yesterday we caught up with Stacey in her and Glauco's office.  Boy! She sure was hard at work at her computer!  When asked what she was up to, with a wry smile she answered, "Data analysis.  It can be exciting, sometimes not so exciting." Glauco, also at his desk, answered he was indeed busy with his experiments this week.

The Science Spotlight team stopped by the Sotka lab today and found Sarah and Paige who had just finished cleaning up in the wetlab.  It turns out, sometimes things in science don't always go as planned- and a lot of times there isn't a plan, because you just don't know. In this case, raising and growing Gracilaria in a lab meant that at some point, some of these specimens might "kick the bucket", quite literally.  Much of the Gracilaria residing in the wetlab had died off and as of yesterday, the Sotka lab was down from 48 buckets housing algae to 22.  This is neither a positive or a negative necessarily, just the natural flow of events in a lab over time as experiments and research goes on.  Despite the death of some specimens, Sarah is wrapping up one last experiment with the Gracilaria collected in Japan.

Follow up with our blog this week as we discuss a potential theory for the wetlab Gracilaria mortality!

Whew! The lab sure is BUSY! This past Monday the whole lab got together to work on "tip isolation".  This means they were removing the "tips" (ends) of Gracilaria they had grown or collected for "assaying".  The simplest definition of an assay is a kind of experimental method.  Sarah let us know that it took 4 people 3 hours of nonstop work to complete this task. Wow! That is 12 man hours!  We also met Glauco Machado, a visiting scientist from Brazil working with Dr. Sotka. What a day!