Kicking the Bucket.

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!