Greetings from Butler Library! I probably should have written this while I was still out in the "field", but how I feel it is at least a little appropriate to be doing it from Butler. Anyway, I'll give a brief description of my activities this summer. I left NYC on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend to begin my 12 hour journey down to the small town of Beaufort, NC (pop. 4,189 according to wikipedia). I sublet a house near the Beaufort waterfront from a Duke Marine Lab student for roughly a quarter of my NYC rent. This was very exciting.
I had a couple days to settle in due to the long holiday weekend, and then my work began immediately. I reported to NOAA (which has a very nice building on its own little island across a drawbridge) early on Tuesday morning, filled out some necessary government paperwork, and was in the lab by noon. Security around there was tight, the need for me to send fingerprints before even heading down there gave me the opportunity to go to a real NYC police station.
I won't bore people with a detailed description of my lab work, but the techniques I was using
are in the field of skeletochronology. Long story short, everyone knows how trees get rings in the their trunks because tree growth is cyclic (sidenote: the study of this is called dendrochronology). These rings can be used to determine age, as well as growth rates. So, it was discovered that some animals deposit rings in their bones the same way, specifically: loggerhead sea turtles. I had a large sample size (around 120) of humeri from stranded Pacific loggerheads from the years 2003-2008 and I was processing these bones in order to get a good idea of how old each individual was, as well as how the growth rates compared to each other. A standard bone (medium sized) would take around 2 weeks to fully process to a stage where growth rings were visible and able to be counted. If you want a full description of the methods, please read my paper in the spring of 2011.
Living in Beaufort was great. Groceries were cheap, it was always sunny and hot, and I got to live right by the ocean. Blackbeard the pirate lived in Beaufort for a bit, and it used to be quite the pirate hot spot. And there were palm trees! Not to mention all the sweet tea one could want. I was lucky in that I had a few visitors come see me and I got to play the tourist on weekends after working 45 hours a week in the lab. The people in the lab next door let me go out on the boat with them a few times to catch live loggerheads for sample-taking and satellite tagging, which more than made up for all my hours in the lab.
I did have one mishap with the lab equipment that required five stitches, but I was lucky enough to know where the hospital was and the scar is very minimal. All in all, it was a very busy summer that has yielded lots and lots of data for me to process this year. As I write this, we only have about a week and a half left before classes begin. I look forward to seeing you all and hearing about your summers!
One last note: sweet tea vodka was a fun southern thing I had to try. But I think it's out of my system now.
No comments:
Post a Comment