Soil and Sod

Hey Guys, just checking in to tell you what's up with the fungi group. The last two weeks have been full of fungal activity! We have started another round of soil experiments and have finished up another RBBR and half way through with a sawdust. It's very interesting to see how some strains act in different experiments! Some of the ones that were really good the first time around are not so good the second.
What we are working on now is a master list of all the strains we are in charge of and what experiments they have been in. It's a lot of work and I am not super fond of Excel. That being said it's interesting to look at the data we have collected over the year and see trends, or see just how little the data helps with one strain or another. I can tell that data management along the way is very helpful, now we have to set up smaller scale experiments to replace some of the missing data with. Or Thom will have to without us. Either way much more work has to be put into what work we have already done to make our data useful. Anyways, it's busy around here and the weather hasn't been helpful! Have fun in the sun!
-C

July Update

Happy Summer!
Yay; now that the weather is finally good our work has really picked up its pace and Joey and I have completed our presentation requirements for the program! We presented to a couple of sections of the Upward bound Program, a program to encourage education for youth at risk, usually these kids are very bright but have bad family lives or no post high school experience in their family. The two groups we presented to were great kids full of good questions and interesting insight into what we are doing in the lab. The learning curve is always really steep when we present because most people don't know anything about fungi but by the end of our session these kids had all sorts of ideas for experiments and some pretty hard questions to tackle. Regardless we have a lot of fun with them and are really happy to be done with our presentations.
In the lab, things are going well, our new sawdust experiment is going good and we just set up a new soil trial(After some minor water content difficulties,) I should be ready to transfer my plugs to soil tomorrow. So between the three experiments we're running right now and the ever so fun worksheets that go along with them, we are keeping ourselves pretty busy.
Well that's about it, I'll catch you later!
-C

Wrapping Up June

Well it has been an exciting few weeks for the fungi group!
We have been working on a few different experiments and presenting to some classes. We presented to a science business class which was very fun and pretty easy.
This last week we continued our soil experiment, started our RBBR trial, and have set up a new sawdust experiment. Although the students going to Costa Rica this summer are in the lab almost 24/7, which makes transferring plugs very tricky. So setting that up is very important but it may have to sit over the weekend because I am going to Canada for my birthday this weekend.
I am very excited to have fun and relax finally since the last few weeks have been very stressful. This next month should be very exciting with all the new experiments we are planning on setting up.
Well we are about to meet with Tom so I will blog later!
-C

End of the Quarter

Well, finally we have reached the end of a very long and stressful quarter. I am very excited to really focus on our fungi projects. Our soil project is going really well, I have to measure today but it's normally fun and easy to do.
I presented to one of Brian's classes on Wednesday night, it was pretty fun and really easy. The other three presentations I am required to do will probably for the Upward bound Program, Joey's friend is an instructor and wants his classes to see all sorts of exciting and interesting guest speakers. I know his first thought was "FUNGI!" :)
Anyways, I know those kids will be fun and I hope that I can teach them something.
Sometime this next week we will probably start a new master collection on toothpicks, an idea that Janet and I came up with. ;) And then continue the soil experiment. I think we have a fungi team meeting on Monday to figure more out about our goals for this summer.
Other than that I don't have much to tell you about, oh My number 140 is kicking butt on the soil experiment which makes me really happy!
Later
-C

May Madness

Hey all, sorry it's been so long! We have been so busy in the lab setting up the new soil experiment that I haven't blogged in quite awhile.
The experiment is something Janet Joey and I got to set up on our own without Tom's advice. It was fun to see exactly what needs to be determined before you set up an experiment and just how hard it is to find a suitable form of measurement.
We picked 20 strains each out of 25-28 strains and then placed colonized sticks of the 20 strains in test tubes and large petri dishes to measure the lateral and radial growth of each fungi.
Let's just say it sounds easier to set up than it really was. Stuffing test tubes is no fun but we got everything running and I will get to take my first set of measurements tomorrow. :)
Other than that, our diesel experiment is wrapping up and we're planning on starting some new sticks for our master collection but this time we're going to use toothpicks instead of cut up Popsicle sticks.
Well, thats about it for now, I will blog again soon and I promise I won't forget to add some pictures!!
-C

End of April

Well here it is the end of the month and with it comes the close of the fastptich season and the beginning of some awesome weather. I am really excited for the weather to warm up but I am totally bummed that softball is ending. It will be a good break though because I can refocus on on our fungi experiments and REU presentations. :S
They should be fairly easy substance wise but any presentation requires a whole lot of preparation and planning to come out well done.

Our diesel plates are growing rapidly and we will probably start another experiment sometime soon.
My one new stick plate is growing contamination free so it should be ready for transfer in a few weeks.
Other than that there isn't a whole lot going on. We requested keys for the lab but I haven't been able to pick mine up yet. I keep missing the person I need to see to sign for the key. :P Anyways, enjoy the sun!!
-C

Diesel Round Two

Well our diesel experiment is up and running! The new building is really nice to work in it's just been a small challenge to find time when classes are not using all the labs. So I am actually waiting for a class to get out of the lab right now to do measurements.
Hopefully none of the plates will have contamination and I can just measure twice a week.
In other exciting news, the PC softball team is doing good, we beat Skagit yesterdays and are travelling to Edmonds on Friday and Everrett Saturday, as long as the weather stays nice it should be a lot of fun! It also means I have to cram all my lab work for this week and make up a math test before we leave Friday morning.
I have also been working hard on a few scholarship applications, I have one more to finish before the end of next week and then I am done with those too! :D

Well That's about it, oh I guess Jacob and I have to fine tune our power point presentation and present it on Monday so we have to get together and work on that too. Anyways, I got to get stiff done!
Later!
-C

Getting Back into the Swing of Things

Well here we are in Spring Quarter and I must say it's great to get back into the groove. We are pretty much moved into the science building. We still have to figure out exactly where and when classes are taking place so we can use the sterile hood when we want. We poured new diesel plates last week and were doing transfers this week. I'll try and take some new photos of the transfer method but I can't make any promises.
At any rate I'm back at school and keeping busy with everything.
Catch you later!
-C

Spring Quarter Update

Well I feel so behind on my blogging, life has been insane! But I survived winter quarter so it's almost over!

Our fungi group lab had to pack up and move out of the old chem lab and into the new science building so we packed and labeled boxes for the move. Our next big mission was to get our sterile hood out of the lab and into the back of a truck, it is a heavy and expensive piece of machinery so in the end we decided to let people more qualified to lift heavy items take it out to the truck for us.
The last trip through the old lab was sad because all our fungi and equipment were gone, but hopefully construction on the new building will be quick! (yeah right!)
This quarter we should be continuing our work on genetic research and possibly starting our plot surveys up again. Additionally we have to start organizing our data we have collected throughout the year and work on creating a presentation we could use at a science conference. It should be a fun and exciting quarter!

Catch ya later!
-C

ENV 290 Videocast

Here is my group's vidcast, enjoy!
-C

ENV 290 Final Draft Podcast

Here is my Final Draft podcast, Enjoy! I'm off to Florida!
-C

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A Small Update

Well I am so busy this week I just needed to blog and leave a short update so here it goes.
Our RBBR plates are going good, I had odd contamination on two plates right next to each other, it looked like I got another fungus in both plates and it was a lot! So I restarted one of the plates and so far it looks good, the other one will just have to wait to be rerun. Tomorrow we should be meeting to start some PCR on a few of our fungal strains and I am very excited about it! I will have to remember to bring my camera so we can take some photos. We also organized our master collection last week and make sure we had all our dried specimens and all our numbers in plates of growing fungi.
Joey and I are also working with another friend from the REU program on our PowerPoint presentation, all we really have left to do is add some photos and maybe a few more slides, it should look really good!
Anyways, I am very excited to leave for Florida! We leave on Tuesday and I am sure I will have a blast but I am not looking forward to missing a week of school!
Well, that's it for now I think, I should be posting another blog in a week or two.
Later!
-C

Env290: Podcast: Feb 22, 2009

Here is my required podcast for the REU program. I hope you like it, it's not very exciting but it could only be 90 seconds long and it was the first time I made anything like this. The last month has been really busy with REU, school and softball. I haven't had a whole lot of time to blog but I promise I will be updating again this week.
Later,
-C

Frenetic Febuary

Well Hello, it's been a while.

Lab is going great, we just started our RBBR and stick plates last week and I start measuring growth on the RBBR plates tomorrow. The stick plates are normal plates that we are going to grow the fungi on, put some small sticks of wood on for the fungi to eat then take the wood off the plate and store it in vials in the fridge, this will be our master library of all our fungi. I will take some pictures of plates tomorrow and of all the smaller sticks I made out of pop sickle sticks.

Joey and I have to make a powerpoint about what we have been doing in lab this year and one of the other REU students, Lisa is going to help us out. We are both happy to have another person to help out on the workload, it's a little crazy right now.

At any rate, my main focus lately has been to keep plugging away at classes and getting ready for our softball trip to Orlando. I am going to miss four days of class when we venture down to Florida for a spring training tourney. I am not complaining about getting to visit Florida just worried about how much work I need to do before and after I get back. :s Not fun!

Besides that I don't have much to tell you, I'll just tack on a pic and call this post good! Post again soon.

Later!

-C

It was a misty day today, and it snowed so this pic seemed appropriate.

ENV 290 Op-ed #2 "Shit Happens"

We hear about Victoria, BC's impact on water quality due to sewage dumping but what are we contribute to the strait's startling amount of pollutants? Let's not forgot our rivers either. Should we be taking better care of the water quality in our local rivers? Where does all this pollution come from and how can we reduce our impact? What else can we do to help clean up our watershed? These are all questions citizens of Clallam County should be asking themselves, especially if they are not on city water. These people have been slapped with a string of new codes to follow concerning wastewater and septic systems. These codes will require many residents to replace their septic system, a big ticket item to say the least. While septic systems are normally something we try not to think about, should we be more concerned about where our wastes go?
Twenty-five percent of U.S. citizens rely on septic systems as their on-site wastewater treatment system. A large percentage of these people live in rural areas, like Clallam County, where no city water system is offered outside the city limits. The only option for rural families comes down to septic systems. These systems are fairly simple in design and have served as a reliable form of a wastewater disposal for more than a hundred and fifty years. The basic idea behind the septic system is to take gray water away from a home into a tank where, through a series of tubes, the water is released slowly into the ground. This traditional design is called a gravity fed system. While this is, for the most part, effective in areas with soft dry soil. In areas like the Olympic Peninsula where our soil is mostly clay-based and saturated most of the year, gravity fed systems have more than a few downfalls. With hard packed and saturated soil, released wastewater is not easily absorbed and so often sewage ponds form on top of septic tanks. These sewage ponds serve as breeding sites for all sorts of harmful diseases for humans and animals. And these ponds do not smell great by any means. If a gravity fed septic tank is close to a wetland or natural pond, the wastewater will naturally flow directly into these ecosystems. Not only will this contaminate that ecosystem but the waste will also be carried through creeks and into rivers eventually ending up out in the ocean. In small, slow amounts, human sewage has little impact on the environment. With a lot of outdated sewage systems throughout Clallam County, this wastewater becomes a bigger issue.
This is why Clallam County recently updated septic systems codes to require home owners to replace outdated gravity fed systems with new mound systems. These systems are larger and are built into the ground with dirt mounded on top to insure proper diffusion of wastewater. These systems also have pumps that keep tank pressure constant and control the rate of wastewater release. These systems no longer need to be placed in low spots, they can be higher or on the same level as the home and still work effectively. The soil saturation should be lower in these areas, meaning the bacteria and microorganisms that break down the sewage can work more effectively. Local codes also require new systems to be further away from wetlands and ponds than older systems. The slower the release of the wastewater, the more of it can be filtered out by microorganisms, making it safer for our creeks, rivers and ocean.
So why are some people against these new codes? It comes down to one thing: cost. Replacing an old systems is very expensive. Before you can even put a new systems in a few tests need to be taken. A perk test is a soil test that measures the amount of water saturation. Knowing this will help decide where your drain field should be put, but this test requires a soil specialist. Just having one come out to your property can be expensive. It is then necessary for a specialist to determine if there is any wetland area on your property. Using all this information, the placement of your drain field will be decided. The design, permit and approval process can take more than a year to complete.
Septic systems can be very economical and eco-friendly but up front costs are causing some people to resist. If we really care about our water quality then we need to take care of water runoff issues like outdated septic systems. It might be hard on the wallet now but if we ignore issues like this one, the real cost could be catastrophic.

Here is an old gravity fed tank.

Here is a new mound system tank, you can see the tank requires a pump and filter, this and the added baffle makes it much more efficient.

Wrapping Up January

Wow! It's the last week of January, what happened??!! Time went by so fast this month, I just can't believe it. I think that I need to update you on our recent lab activity. We have been busy! Janet, Joey and I transferred our "master copies" earlier this week. It's not a huge job but it does take a few hours to make the new plates and then a few more hours to take plugs from the old ones and transfer them to new plates. We are all very excited to run a new experiment because we all have a few new strains of fungi to monitor. Every time we successfully culture from a mushroom we document and dry the mushroom and assign the new culture a number. Most of the time we use numbers so that we don't start to remember the names of the fungi, that could bring bias into our study, but, it's also easier to write a number on a plate. (Most fungi names are LONGGGG!!!!) So we all have five new strains to run in our experiments. We will probably rerun a RBBR, PAH, and Diesel experiment another time. Before we can really think about publishing or even share our data we need a few trials to stabilize our numbers, and hopefully, lower our margin of error.

Our other latest endeavour was soil particle suspension. We prepared plates with anti-bacterials and fungi food to pipette washed soil particles onto in hopes to get some fungal colonies directly from the soil. We took the core drilling kit into the woods and took some samples from our plots. We then washed those sample and separated the particles by size. We decided to use the smallest particles we could to test out this suspension method and our plates have been sitting for a week with little to no activity. We're not 100% sure but we may have killed off the fungi with all the chemicals on the plates, or, we suspended the soil particles wrong..... Who knows. We're planning on trying again but until then we are monitoring our plates.

Our sawdust and mulch experiment is going good as well. All our samples seem to be growing but most have not spread too far from the plug. Hopefully this week growth will speed up a bit.

I'll try and take a good pic of my fastest one so far, it might not turn out so well but whatever.

Well that's about it for now, our group is meeting tomorrow for our weekly article discussion, this week we are reading about PCR on fungi because that is something Tom wants us to get into soon. It's something I am really interested in, I have always loved learning about genetics and all those sorts of things so it's fun stuff to read about.

Other than that I got nothing else to really talk about, school has been horrible the last three weeks, just busy and chaotic. I'm trying to keep it together!

Anywho, Oh I wanted to post a pic so here!!!

My awesome view of the mountains from my kitchen window!

Later! -C

Week Two of Winter Quarter; Lab Party!

Hey so on Friday Janet and I stayed in the lab to set up a new experiment pretty late, I think we spent 6.5 hours just getting things set up. It didn't help that our building is being combed through for all the lab equipment, nor that it takes autoclaves so long to heat up and cool down. But we really had a blast, we got to talk about some personal things and just hangout and it was great! Oh, we also got Chinese together because it was so late. We decided next time we were just going to bring our sleeping bags and have a slumber party in the lab!
Our new experiment is interesting, we are taking our five fastest growing cultures and placing plugs in flasks of sawdust, that green mulch they use for hydroseeding, and a mixture of the two. The mulch was pretty messy and we had to do it all by mass not volume so we had to measure out 10g of both on an old scale. It took longer than a digital scale would have!
Like I said though, we were there for a while so while we were waiting for the autoclave I read a chapter of my biology out loud to Janet, she liked that. :p All in all we had entirely too much fun! (Only science nerds like us would consider that fun, but hey!)

Oh and because it's awesome here is my quote of the week:
"It's good enough for government work."

2009

Well Happy New Year! I can see this year will be filled with lots of new opportunities for me, especially through the REU program. In the mean time, I have been reading like mad!!

Over break our fungi group was assigned this interesting 30 page article, (book would be a more appropriate term) it was hard to get started, but a lot of what the paper discussed ties well into what we are doing (or hoping to do) in the lab. I can see where most of our procedures came from with all the recent readings this year, I think every one of them had at least some major procedure that we also use in the lab.

The one thing I had an issue with on this current reading was that part of it focused on trying to bring out all of the different types of fungi in a soil sample, in order to get an appropriate idea of species diversity and richness. This is all well and good for population and species diversity studies, but I always get back to the point that we aren't looking to mess around with all the different species of fungi, mostly just white rot fungi. So why are we reading about procedure to coax the slow growing fungi into growing on media?

It's not like I didn't enjoy learning some of the procedures, it was great! I just have a horrible habit of approaching assigned reading with one question in mind, how does this relate to what I am doing and what am I supposed to take out of this reading to relate it back to my class?

So I am a little critical about a lot of the assigned reading, sorry.

Anyways, we're meeting tomorrow to discuss the reading and learn our new tasks for the next few weeks. I don't think I had anymore to say, other than I wanted to post a picture I took of the recent snow fall here because it's pretty and I can. mwah hahahaha!

-C