Week Six

So I know I haven't been really good about Posting every week so I will post a BIG one today updating you on what we have been doing the last two weeks. Last week we combed our plots for more mushrooms and cataloged them. I finally got my pics to upload so here are a few pics of what we found.

We didn't positively ID this guy yet but he is a lot bigger than what we normally find.

This Guy was actually almost dead so we didn't keep him but he's a type of mushroom called a poly pore, this is a type of almost woody mushroom that grows on trees and logs and can live a lot longer than most mushrooms!

We found both of these guys in our conifer plot , the first one was in the ground and Joey spotted it, the second one was on a fallen log. It is definitely becoming obvious that we find many more mushrooms in the hardwood plot than in the conifer plot. I think this has to do with the soil pH.(It's probably more acidic in the conifer soil. ) At any rate our catalogs for both plots are growing larger and larger. We will walk our plots again tomorrow to grab any new mushrooms we might spot.

Our RBBR experiment is almost wrapping up, a few of the fast growing fungi have totally cleared the blue dye, (none of the one's I am measuring!) but a few of mine are really close. I also measure those again tomorrow. Here's a picture of the set up.

You can see the plates with the fungi colonies in the center, we took plugs of each strain of fungi we have and placed them on plates of RBBR. Every other day we have been frequenting the lab to take measurements of growth and decolorization. Tomorrow I will take a few more pics to show you the difference between a strain that does good on the RBBR media and one that does not. Tomorrow I might even have a strain that finished the experiment and completely decolorized its plate! I can also show you what the data sheet looks like that I fill out every time I take measurements.

We will also be starting a new experiment tomorrow with a new contaminant and control so I will be busy transferring plugs and organizing plates. For our RBBR experiment, we didn't run a control plate but this time we need to be able to measure the difference in growth rate between contaminated plates and control plates. I am excited to compare my results with Joey and Janet's to see just who really had the best plates to measure. (I think Joey did!)

I have also been watching mushrooms around campus to bring into the lab and id, tomorrow I will take a few photos of a whole population I have been watching and maybe try to culture a few of them for our fungi library, some are easier to culture than others and I am not sure if the ones I have been watching are what we are looking for.

Other than that I have just been really, really busy with school. I am really taking too many classes this quarter and I think next quarter I will either take a break from math or take stat. instead of calc. because math is just taking too much time out of my day. I have decided to stay at PC for another year and I am thinking that next year I will just take just math and physics. (Which should finally give me enough time for all my homework!) Right now I am spending so much time in class I haven't got a lot of time for work outside of class other than on the weekends. I still have a chemistry paper to write and a biology write-up to start, and math just keeps piling up! I am counting down the days for this quarter to end, thankfully it's pretty soon.
Well, I will blog again tomorrow! Until then,
-C