Day one of our NSF Diadema April time series project on St Thomas USVI. An experiment is up and running; lots of good diadema out there, and plenty of weird algae, including a bloom of dinos I think is Karlodinium polykrikoides adjacent to our site. Also Lyngbya (benthic cyano).

5/ Awardee @heatherfeaga.bsky.social is investigating how bacteria decide when to go dormant💤 (ie, form spores). Her project could lead to important new advancements in the management of spore-forming bacteria in the environment, hospitals, & food supply.
🎉 Congrats Dr. Feaga!
🙏 #HFScout Dipti Nayak

That is you need to add something to make the dna bind to the column matrix

Depends on the kit I think. If it’s Zymo then the IIF columns are just filters for big stuff, so could be compatible at the second step where you add genomic lysis buffer. But wouldn’t work in other kits or kits without genomic lysis buffer bc you need to add guanodinium isothiocyanate and salts

I’ve been injured with a groin tear (thanks, water polo) for a week and in the last couple of days have become ravenous. Is it normal to eat a whole box of triscuits and 4oz of cheese in one day?

Don’t have one specifically, but as a partial dna extraction, if you’re interested in quantity you’d have to extract all the volume of dna/rna shield not just the tissues.

Me too. Ever since Columbia

Wait, so maybe I shouldn’t have returned my iodine pills to Walmart this morning.

Amen

After 2.5 weeks held up in Los Angeles by F*dex, pleased to say that they’re on their way again after a 30 min phone call to the company to reiterate everything I’ve been saying for the last couple of weeks (not plants, animals). Explanation given: “it’s now coded”. Grrr

Important findings from this work: 1) Diadema savignyi experienced mass mortality in Tahiti in 2013; 2) the die off did not correspond to a strong shift in algal cover; and 3) unfortunately no specimens remain today (like the 80s antillarum die off), so in future please collect!

Moreover, if you are at a field site and note unusual mass mortality of any animal or plant, my opinion is that it’s incredibly valuable to document it in the scientific literature!

Mass mortality events often go undescribed, because often they are anecdotal or lack pre-mass mortality quantitative study. This leads to the false interpretation that contemporary mass mortalities are ‘new’ or ‘different’. On the contrary, reports like this serve as important records of observation

Excited to see this come out! 13 years ago Stella Hein (Executive Director, Office of Access and Community Empowerment) performed work as part of her PhD looking at a Diadema mass mortality in Tahiti. I was excited to help her publish this! www.int-res.com/journals/mep...

I still get chills when watching space launches. I was at cape canavaral when a rocket launch with a satellite had to abort and was exploded mid air. And I watched the challenger disaster live like many kids in the 80s. Brave astronauts those.

In a bold move to promote safety and reduce risk, Cornell will be the first institution in the nation to require life jackets for researchers any time they read peer-reviewed papers about marine topics.

I think the link may be incorrect

Update on samples. Still in Los Angeles. Called them again, person said they’d refer to the case manager but they said I didn’t need anything else submitted. Which is what they said a week ago.

Absolutely. The weird thing is, this is Los Angeles. I’ve never had any package clear in LA before…

Please forward the package and documentation to the federal agencies. Your own employees should not be gatekeeping when they clearly have no idea.

Dear FedEx. My specimens have been stuck in “customs clearance” for two weeks now. I’ve been on the phone 5 times with you, filled out the two forms you sent (including one for plants… which they’re not, the other pharmaceuticals… which they’re not), and been passed from agent to agent.

More success today: PCR worked, dna off for sequencing, cultures still crashing for no apparent reason, and managed to look at some deep sea echinoderm microbiome data. Super cool.

Definitely bringing today up with my therapist

One of those days.
Checked cultures… they failed
Attempted PCR… it failed
Tried to connect something to our campus network… it failed
Tried to work on data… that failed
Tried to do something really basic… and failed

Going home.

Update. FedEx thought that sea urchins are plants. They sent me a form for declaring plant materials for APHIS. Ugh.

FedEx have folks who screen shipments for what they think are needing permits; it’s not actually usda/aphis nor fws. Then they hand off to these agents and it is then passed on. Thank goodness for dna/rna shield.

Classic shipping fiasco with FedEx. Urchins coming from Australia stopped a week ago for agricultural review. No attempt to contact me, just sitting there. Called twice- they don’t know what documentation is needed (aquatic inverts have a specific exemption for aphis/usda). Fws cleared it.

Flying home on Saturday night had some bonus material to the north over Toronto…

Eating a pickled sea cucumber (sea pickles) also works