Daily Plethora

It doesn’t seem possible that our work here is over half-way over…it seems like we just got started!  We had a great July 4th with fireworks and a cookout, and now we’re on the downhill side of the research experience.

Having gathered all of my data already, I have been helping some of the others with theirs.  Today I got up nice and early and went over to help Michawn count E. coli colonies on agar plates…32 plates in all…covered in little bitty white dots.  I was seeing spots the rest of the day!  Then it was time for lizard care again.  We had gotten in a new shipment of wild caught green anoles and they are beginning to lay eggs…we have found 10 in the last three days!  These are being incubated to add to the population in the lab.

I have been concentrating on getting my data analyzed, so other things have sorta been neglected…like my blog.  But, hopefully, I am going to have some free time shortly and I plan to spend some of it nosing around Stillwater.  Look for some interesting pictures in the next week or so.  I’m signing off now so I can get up early enough to see my mentor in the morning. Take care!

Not much going on here at OSU this weekend…everyone seems to have cleared out!  I hear there’s a rodeo in Perkins, but it’s just too hot for me to want to drive anywhere.  I may venture into the swelter occasionally. Like, this morning I went to Best Buy and picked up a pair of speakers for my computer…finally, I can get some decent sound!  I love my little Toshiba, but the tinny-sounding, low-volume speakers it has just irritate me.  Now I can enjoy some smooth jazz while I write my blog without being directly wired to the audio output by a set a earbuds.  Aaaahhhhhhhhhh…

I have read two novels this weekend already…and they have nothing to do with lizards. I decided to check out Hastings here in Stillwater last week.  Since I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to read, I decided to look for some books by a facebook friend and fellow Great Dane “owner”, Yvonne Navarro.  I found Concrete Savior by myself – in one section – but since it was the second in the Dark Redemption series, I wanted to start at the beginning.  Fortunately, the helpful young man at the information desk–never hesitate to ask directions!–pointed me to where Highborn was shelved, and I left the store with both books in hand to read sometime this summer.  This was the weekend!

And once I started, I couldn’t stop! I read during meals and way too late into the night, and even gave up my visit to see the dogs this afternoon just to continue reading!  (Well, that and it was just too danged hot to have dogs out today…even with a fountain for cooling off.)  Yvonne writes very descriptively — I could actually see and feel and smell exactly what the characters are experiencing.  And I cried [spoiler alert] when Grunt was injured.  I eagerly await the next in the Dark Redemption series…go, Navarro!!

Well, it’s way past my bedtime and I need all the sleep I can get before they bring another group of noisy kids into the dorm for camp this next week. Teenagers away from home…ugh! Those of you traveling, have a safe trip this holiday weekend!

Yesterday was blah…so I’m just gonna forget it happened and go on to today – FRIDAY!  That automatically makes a better day, right?

Hatched 7-1-2011

Most of the morning was spent taking care of lizards.  This includes checking the incubator for newly-hatched, precocious green anoles.  They are checked every day as there is no food source in the little jars of vermiculite in which they hatch out.  And today I found this little guy.  Yes, it’s a boy, and no, it’s not easy to tell which is which at this age.  The male has a pair of scales on the underside of the tail base which are larger than those on a female, but it takes a good light, a magnifying glass, and practice to really be sure.  Fortunately, they will be rechecked at 30-days-of-age to verify…and probably several times after that, too, so if I’m wrong on any of them it can be corrected before it becomes an issue.  I just hope I haven’t traumatized any of them by misidentifying their gender.  That might affect any other behavior studies in the future…. Wait, these are just lizards…sheesh.

These hatchlings and juveniles (some of whom will become delinquents, I’m sure) are fed crickets and fruit flies.  I’m sure you can tell from the pictures that they can handle the fruit flies, as you know how small the normal fruit fly is.  But these are not normal fruit flies – these are flightless fruit flies (say that three times real fast…lol).  They have a genetic mutation which prevents their wings from developing and allowing them to fly.  This enables the baby lizards to catch them and prevents the flies from escaping the tanks to become pests.

The crickets are something else, though.  They are what are commonly called “pinheads” because that is about how big they are.  These are newly hatched nymphs that are small enough for even the baby lizards to eat.  And they do!  Dump a few of these into a tank and all the youngsters appear from wherever they were hiding.

Normally I have help with the lizard care, but my partner was tied up with something a little more important today than spraying tanks and feeding lizards – she is getting married tomorrow!  She tried to say she would come in and help, that she didn’t want to leave me to do it by myself, and I (and our mentor) told her “NO WAY! Get out there and enjoy the big day coming up!”  I want to wish Michawn and Charles a fantastic wedding day tomorrow and a long and happy life together!

I’m going to go find a new spot to eat supper and then retire with my copy of Concrete Savior by Yvonne Navarro (also available as an ebook) for the night.  Have a great, but safe, holiday weekend!

Today we piled thirteen adults into a van and headed for Tulsa to tour the OSU BioMed research facility and meet with a couple of the researchers working there. They are married and alternately completed their undergraduate, masters, doctoral, and post-doctoral work.

High school sweethearts, they married and started a family before either of them even wanted to think about college.  After working for a while as an auto mechanic, Dr. Tom got a job at a plant as a welder and took advantage of their tuition plan and started taking classes at a community college, as did his wife.  By working together, and I mean one working while the other was attending school, they managed to raise two children and pull each other through a series of programs to achieve their goals, with Dr. Kath finishing her second post-doc as Dr. Tom was completing his Ph.D.  They share a huge lab at OKU Center for Health Sciences and really seem to enjoy what they do as research and life partners.

Wow…and I thought juggling undergraduate education, a part-time job, and dog rescue was complicated!  Where one went, the other had to have an opportunity available also.  This may have limited their options, but it never deterred them from their objective – that both were worthy of achieving as much as possible.

“To him that will, ways are not wanting.”                                                                                                  George Herbert’s Jacula Prudentusm (1640).

…and to her, too.

Having finished gathering my data (all of the male anoles were tired of me stressing them), it was time to sit down with a statistics program and see what the numbers could tell us.  I was enthralled!  I sat in front of the computer for four hours today evaluating differences and correlations and variables and looking for answers to the questions I had posed and hypotheses I had proposed and the more answers I found, the more questions I thought of for which I wanted answers.  This research stuff could get to be addicting!

I printed out the session that I had been working on and returned to my room.  After resting my eyes a bit (watching David Boreanaz), I resumed the perusal of the results.  This is beginning to look very promising and I look forward to sharing my results in a peer-reviewed publication in the near future…or probably on a poster.  Publication is what every researcher aspires to – that and finding the cure for the common cold – and is very much (I assume) like any other publication attempt.  There are no contracts, so articles are sent from one journal to another, starting with the “big names” and winding up with the local small-town rag.  This is one of the ways that researchers develop thick skin – those thank you letters with “REJECTED” or whatever stamped all over them.  But once you’re in, you’re in!  Well, sorta.

Getting an paper published doesn’t guarantee that you will become the next Hawking or Einstein or Losos, but it sure looks good on a resume or CV.  So I plan to give this data a thorough shakedown and run with it as far as it will go.  Wish me luck!

I spent most of the morning trying not to get out of bed…anybody else ever have that kind of Monday? Actually, I was waiting on a call from Michelle to see if she needed any assistance this today, and she was obviously having that kind of morning also.  But that’s to be expected with four kids!  I finally went on over to the lab and started checking nestboxes for eggs and preparing to feed the ones that I knew she wouldn’t be filming.  She filmed a few…then her camera went nutso, so we called it a day.

Our discussion class today included a panel of graduate students who were discussing the power of grants – free money that you have to work hard to get.  Finding and applying for grant money is a key to financing that post-graduate work, so they were sharing experiences and passing on tips on becoming a successful grant writer.

After that, I went to grab a bite to eat and was debating whether or not to go over to the library lawn to check out the dogs.  I thought, since it was still 95° at 7:00, there might not be too big a crowd, but I was desperate!  I got my doggie treats and headed out.  Fortunately, it was not as hot as it would seem and most of the lawn was shaded by then, so I was not to be disappointed – there was a crowd already playing and rolling and chasing and just having a big-ol’ time (that’s Southern for FUN!).

Boomer remembered me! Boomer is a border collie – a very smart and energetic breed – and he knew I had treats! He already knows a lot of tricks, so we were working on “off”, which is the same as “leave it” but shorter. He hadn’t seen me in two weeks, but he knew he wouldn’t get the treat until he turned away from it…which I could tell was really hard for him to do with the crowd that we were drawing. But he did.  I got a facial and he got treats – sound like a good trade?

And then…I looked out across the lawn…and there he was! A big, beautiful fawn standing

Duke

Today was spent helping a grad student.  Michelle is in charge of the lizards that I have been studying and she needed to do some tests herself.  I volunteered to help and figured I could learn some tips, since she has been working with them for a couple of years. And indeed I did.

I learned that the easiest way to get these little escape artists out of corners and off of walls

Pin...

...and capture.

On feeding days, it’s less likely that one (or more) of them will make a run for it if you put the food in first and then take the nest box out to check for eggs.  Then they’re too busy fighting over mealworms/crickets/waxworms to even notice that the top of the tank is open.  Unfortunately, they are only fed four days a week and the nest boxes must be checked daily, so that will only help me half the time.

With the exception of the catching technique, these little tricks would appear to common sense, but I hadn’t even thought about them.  Just goes to show again that common sense isn’t really that common.

Seems we arrived in the middle of a heat wave…I just figured it was normal Oklahoma hot!    It’s 10 p.m and it’s still 91 degrees outside.  There has not been a single day since we arrived when the high temperature was below 91 and three days the high was 100 or above. Even the professors have been apologizing for the weather…frankly, I like it.  It’s just not that bad with the lower humidity and the wind blowing.  I even opened the window in my room this morning to enjoy the warm breeze.  They keep the thermostats in the halls set really cool and even if mine is set higher, the fan brings in the cold air.

Oh, dear.  I just had a flash of my grandmother sitting outside at my parents’ house in Raleigh in the middle of July…wearing a sweater.  Everybody else was getting inside as quickly as possible, but she seemed to prefer to stay outside.  I could not understand how she could do that without melting.  I realized that she grew up before air conditioning was the norm, but Piedmont North Carolina in the middle of July is just plain muggy!  And yet now I seem to be comfortable in those high temperatures myself.  Even though I am considerably younger than she was at that time (she had to be in her 80′s), I am beginning to see how much a person’s comfort zone can change through a lifetime.

My “kids” are much less tolerant of temperature extremes than I seem to be right now.  They think that I keep the thermostat set too low in the winter and too high in the summer.  It’s not unusual to find that it has been “adjusted” closer to what they prefer.  Of course, nobody admits that they did it, but then they don’t pay the electricity bill, either.

I hope they’re staying comfortable while I’m away, cause after checking this month’s power bill, they may find out just how hot it is in August in Piedmont North Carolina.

The temperature has dropped a couple of degrees, so I think I will open the window again and enjoy the breeze before I head for bed. Good thing my (younger) roommate isn’t here tonight as she would probably say the same thing my “kids” would say: “Aren’t you hot?!”

Yeah, that’s me – Hot Stuff!

I knew things were going too well this summer.  The data collection is finished for my research; I’ve gotten all my literature sources together; the rowdy kids on the dorm hall have gone home; I toured the vet school here at OSU; and then…my cholecystolithiasis rears its ugly head. Gallstones.  Gee, wonder if my insurance covers me in another state if I need to have gallbladder surgery? Probably should have thought about that earlier….

I arose early this morning to tour the vet school, excited to get the chance to check out another prospect. The school here has a BIG large animal program – surprised, right? Oklahoma, cattle, horses, elephants, and all that, you know? Yes, I said elephants.  Well one, anyway.  They had one come in that had been hit by a car.  Can you imagine explaining that to your auto insurance adjuster? They brought it in and before they could cut off the sight of it from the horses, one of them freaked out!  These were horses that thought they had seen everything – huge bulls, llamas, goats, alpaca, iguana, armadillos (those ‘possom-on-a-half-shell thingies), lions and tigers and bears, oh my.  Yes, they treat exotic pets here, too.  This vet school offers a large variety of experiences…but no animal behavior specialty. Still, a very good vet school.

After the tour, we went back to the lab for lizard care.  Feed, collect eggs, treat eggs, spray the tanks, wash water bowls, check lights, really rather mundane things now…not that I don’t still enjoy it!  But before we finished, my stomach began to ache and I knew that the next few hours were not going to be nearly as much fun as the morning was.  I headed back to my room for some quiet time curled up in the fetal position around a heating pad, trying to will every part of my core to relax, and praying for that little piece of cholesterol and bile salts to ease on past that constricted point.

Unfortunately, the discomfort had not diminished before I had to attend my research ethics class, so I took it with me…the discomfort, not the heating pad…though I have done that before, too.  Dr. Gill shared with us his experience with the people affected by the Exxon Valdez oil spill – which, BTW, happened before most of the people in my group were born.  He researches the social and psychological impacts of disasters, such as the oil spill, hurricanes, earthquakes, 9-11, etc., and he never expected to have to go to jail to protect the confidentiality of his subjects.  Fortunately, he didn’t, but the legal battle was long and complicated when Exxon tried to procure data from his research through a process called “discovery”.  Yes, it does exist somewhere besides movies and TV.  They were given the data minus the identifiers that would link it to specific people, but it opened his eyes to the impact that seemingly simple studies could have on a population which shared its thoughts and feelings in a confidential manner.  Sharing his experience opened our eyes also…big business will do anything to avoid paying out one week’s profit to a group of victims.  Twenty percent of the people involved in the class action had died before the case finally reached the Supreme Court.

This lecture reinforced the notion that I really don’t want to research human psychology.  In animal research – and I know that a lot of people are totally against any of it – I am constantly aware that anything I do will have an impact on the animal and it must be determined whether the information desired can be obtained in a humane manner by avoiding pain and suffering. This is my goal – Replace, Reduce, Refine.

Thankfully, during the presentation, the “stomachache” vanished as quickly as it had appeared, and I spent a pain-free evening socializing and discussing our research projects with the group.  That pesky gallbladder was completely forgotten…again.  I probably should get this taken care of before school starts again…or maybe during fall break…after fall semester I should have plenty of time.  Yeah, that’s when I’ll do it.

I don’t know how many of you reading this blog have ever done any research, the results of which you would like to have published…but I salute you!  The research itself – in my case: observing the behavior and physiological signs of stress in these cute little anoles – is not that hard.  Of course, you must maintain excellent records, pay very close attention to the subjects, and remember not to start something you’re timing before you realize that you have to pee.

The difficult part, at least to me, is to review EVERYTHING that has ever been published which mentions anoles, green anoles, behavior, steroids, corticosterone, testosterone, ethanol, display, dewlap, reptiles, aggression, territoriality, and on, and on, and on.  Any two words that you are going to use in sequence must be reviewed to see if anyone else ever published them.  Any idea which you think is public knowledge must be traced to its original published source.  For instance: everyone “knows” the sky is blue.   Right?  Are you sure?  Maybe it’s just you and me.  Maybe we just assume that everyone knows.  But just in case, you research to see who first published this notion.  The body of references for this study is going to be twice as long as the results of the research.  But that seems to be the way it is…so back I go to the journals…all 47382 of them.

Thank God for the internet!

Wait…has someone else already said that?