The lab

Three of the most common questions I've received are "Where do you work?", "Where do you sleep?" and "Where do you eat?" I decided to do a post about each one.

These are pictures of our lab. As you can tell, it is stuffed full of stuff! We don't have enough room, but we make do with what we've got. The other side of the lab is the same size but that's where the soil biogeochemists work so I don't spend much time over there. We all work on the same samples though and we are part of the same project.

One of our inverted microscopes we count nematodes on. There is a sample of nematodes in the dish with the light shining down on it. This scope has a camera mounted to take pictures of interesting stuff. It gives us 40X, 100X, 200X, and 400X zoom, although we only use the 40X routinely and the 100X if we see something interesting. Since it's an inverted scope, the light enters from above and the objectives are below the stage. You can see a tabulator off the left side that we use to actually count nematodes. It is quite common to find 500 nematodes in a sample (some samples even push into 1000!) so we need a convenient way to keep track. We determine things like species, sex or juvenile, and living or dead for the nematodes we see and use the tabulator to keep track of the counts for each group. We are all experienced enough to use the tabulator while we're scanning through a sample without having to look at the tabulator. We also have a mechanical stage which means that we can move the sample dish around using dials instead of moving the dish with our hands. The dials are on the pole mounted downwards on the right side of the scope. The stage is a lifesaver because it moves the sample very smoothly and evenly. The counting dishes have a grid engraved on them so we can easily scroll through each line and keep track of the area we've already covered.

The two microscopes we use

The lab as viewed from the window (near where the microscopes are at)

It is Christmas Eve here at McMurdo. We're actually having our Christmas dinner today at 3 PM. We had to sign up for a time slot and everything! They moved dinner up to today since Christmas is on a Sunday this year. They always have a special Sunday brunch, so they'll stick to that schedule tomorrow.

There was also a great article published by the BBC explaining all the animals that we see down here! The author interviewed 2 of the professors who lead our team (including Byron, the professor I work with at BYU) and another professor from New Zealand who we've worked with as well. Here's the link: http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/2177-weird-wildlife-real-animals-antarctica-penguins.html