ABI 198 Field Notes

Tuesday morning the class received the devastating news that our one and only Blathers, Marshall McMunn, was bedridden and confined to his place of residence after testing positive for COVID-19. This author finds it quite suspicious that this would happen the same day that student Natalia Falcon happens to take her seat as MC for the day and suspects that a coup was staged to seize power. Even so, the class bravely fought through this trying time and were able to adapt and meet with their groups in class as normal and with Marshall over zoom. Thankfully, the class structure for today was the same as the last couple sessions and each group made progress toward their specified scope of study. 🌱🫶some gentle reminders...⛲🍵 give it up for week 9 errbody next wednesday is our last day of class (?!?!?!?!?!?!?!) paper’s are due next friday 6/7 EOD guys we fr have to lock in put yourself first + drink water keep up with your lab notebook lookout for the class evaluations!  especially val...

Today we finalized data collection in our small groups! As usual, we started our class with a debrief and discussed maintenance for the soapberry and boxelder treatment groups. After a class poll, we decided to "call it" on maintenance due to the limited amount of live bugs and mostly nymphs. YAY! Here are the results: (Thanks Marshall for creating the visuals!) With the remaining bugs and nymphs, Marshall set them aside for more testing later. As for data, we can use any of the survival data that fits our paper best, or not at all :) Since the end of the quarter is approaching (🤧), also look out for end-of-quarter class evaluations. They should be coming out sometime next week. It's important to help give feedback for the future of this fun & exciting class, so please set aside some time to fill those out! To prepare for writing papers, we will be setting some time to discuss & present informal data/analysis for individual groups. This will help others understan...

Today we successfully continued with group work and collected data! We began the day with a debrief of the next coming weeks in which we wrap up our data collection and begin data analysis. Here is a tentative schedule of our next coming weeks: W 5/22 Data F 5/24 Data W 5/29 Analysis/Finish Data Collection F 5/31 Analyst Writing W 06/05 Turn in Papers + Clean up Outside of class make sure to focus on writing, reading, and analysis of your data. Feel free to reach out to Marshall if you need help on any of these portions of your work!  May 22nd Class Schedule Time Activity 9:00 Meet at Briggs Hall 9:10-15 Debrief + Any announcements 9:15 Group Work and Colony Maintenance 11:10 Break 11:30 Continue Group Work 12:30 Regroup to Discuss Group Progress + Plan Out Next Meeting and Clean Up GROUP UPDATES Palatability Group "Today we did the bug colony maintenance. we took two 1st nstar nymphs from each box and froze them for our trials. We then went outside and had a difficult time with t...

Today, we continued progressing in our groups, and some groups started collecting data! The class started with Marshall making announcements about the soapberry and boxelder guts we sent off to the genome center. Things seem to be going well, and we expect our data to arrive around May 30th! We are excited to get the data back.  With three weeks left, each group is preparing to collect as much data as possible so we can start doing some data analysis and writing our papers.  Class Schedule    Colony maintenance : Palatability group The palatability group maintained the colonies. We collected survival data, changed feeders, and removed dead bugs. There are a lot of nymphs being raised; however, we lost quite a few colony boxes that were empty today. These were all the empty boxes that were cleaned out today, 18 of them. Group updates: Wildcard group The Wild Card team focused on dissection today for boxelder bugs (plus 1 soapberry) and data collection with sex, body l...