As of this afternoon Mikaela and I have cleaned, scanned, and randomized 72 out of the 110 seed heads from the regular remnant populations. Two-thirds of the way done! We just learned how to count the scanned achenes and will get started on that and xraying soon. Hopefully we can be totally done with cleaning, scanning, randomizing, counting, and xraying the remaining third of the seed heads by the end of next week.
We’ve learned so much this past week and have met a lot of cool people. Today we sat in on a lab meeting where we got to see what the draft process is like for scientific papers. I thought it was really interesting; I’ve read a lot of published studies for different classes, but it always seemed like an out-of-reach process. Seeing a bit of the development up close and meeting the people involved made it seem not so distant after all.
In other news, all of our larvae have passed on to a better place. It seems the petri dish full of yummy food (old achenes) wasn’t enough to keep them going. Without their further development, the identity of the larvae may remain a mystery forever…
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