Blogs

Week three consisted of me practicing doing things on my own.  On Monday, at Sharp, Andrei trained Vena and I more on using the sensors and how to run ADK, HLY, and STX targets. He also taught us how to hydrate the sensor chips, or dies, and run data analysis. After our thorough description of duties, we were left to run a couple tests on our own for the remainder of the day. Tuesday was mostly about putting what we learned on Monday to use. We ran two HLY, STX, and ADK target tests on multiple and single probes in order to see what type of signals we would get.

My third week here began with a presentation for my mentors.  Although I was simply presenting my work over the past couple weeks, I was concerned as to how the meeting would go.  It was obvious that I could have articulated myself much better; however, it was important to get into a group discussion regarding my project and this did occur.  Thus, I would say that my presentation was a success and allowed me to learn firsthand the CMOP style for future presentations.  I was given constructive feedback and further instruction for the rest of the week.

My duty is to narrow down habitat opportunity for salmon to the most critical numbers. My research on salmon has been filtered to four types, all of which inhabit our research parameters of the Columbia River estuary. Those four salmon are the chinook, sockeye, coho, and steelhead. Smoltification and adult migration are the life cycles I am most interested in because of the downstream and upstream migration, which our research boundaries affect.

This week we have been trying to figure out which samples to use. We need about 24 samples. This week we have went thru the cruise log of water samples and identified a sample selection of a possible 30 samples. This list is not complete however, and we still need to finalize the selection. We also started to find some of the samples on the list, but have found that it is going to require a fair amount of digging into various -80oC freezers to find them, kinda like fishing for filters. I also attempted at extracting RNA, but failed.

This  is the second week of the program. So far im still trying to get a hang of doing RNA extractions from water samples. I am going start extracting tha samples on my own on monday..

 This past week has been less than productive due to a complete inability to recreate the CMOP database on my machine. Tuesday through the Thursday was spent fruitlessly trying to rectify this problem. However, due to some issues mainly regarding plpythonu and getting it to work with the Postgres database on my computer, we decided that is would be easier just to give me read/write access the CMOP test database. Friday was spent mostly looking over the database and already-in-place code and now it’s time to get back to coding.

I was really excited to start my internship at CMOP, and the first week was very busy. It started on Monday with introductions, pictures, safety training and learning a little bit more about the CMOP internship and my project. I met with my mentor Pete and he explained how this summer I will be focusing on the identification and quantification of protists in the Columbia River estuary.

Meagan, Cynthia, and I, all of us whom are working on this project, made a trip to the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (CRITFC) to introduce ourselves and give some insight on our project to the tribal leaders and elders in attendance. To meet the representatives of the tribes we are researching for meant a lot. We also had the opportunity to meet with salmon and lamprey experts to compile more information for our project. To establish these connections is crucial for the continuance of our research and I look forward to meeting with them in the near future.

Bright eyed and eager to roll up my sleeves and get to work (or more accurately roll them down to cover as much skin as possible...safety first!), my first day at CMOP was exciting. I met the other interns, my mentors, had some safety training, and learned more about what I was going to do this summer.