The fog is lifting: ABI 198 Section A 2025

Friday, May 9th, 2025, was a bright, sunny day. The heat was high, as expected, but things were getting clearer. (It took me way too long to come up with these pretentious half-baked artsy lines, so I am gonna switch to straightforward writing.) The session started with Courtney laying out the day's objectives: the flower team would make the flowers, a team would collect some butterflies, and a microbe team would prepare solutions for Monday. 

And so the discussion began: 10:05

How much solution do we need?

The experiment design team responded, I got busy figuring it out. 

Who is going for butterfly collecting?

The plan for collecting butterflies before the session was changed to butterfly collection during the class. Joseph, Manu, Chloe, Valeria, and Adrian made up the team to capture the beasts. The rest of the folks will make flowers, it was decided.

Where will we place the flowers? 

Stools will be the preferred option. Different sources to acquire them were discussed, and everyone agreed in unison that stealing a couple of them from the library in the name of science won't harm anyone (just kidding). 

From where will the butterflies be collected?

 Arboretum, different locations in the Arboretum were brought up.

Big question: When should we collect butterflies for Monday, Saturday, or Sunday?

Marshal brought this crucial question to light. Saturday is sunny and warm, ideal for butterfly collecting, but keeping them alive for two days will be tough. Sunday is cloudy and windy, but keeping butterflies alive for one day seems achievable. We voted: Sunday will be the day!

With this, it was time for teams to get to their respective tasks. 10:15ish

The flower team divided the task: Eva, Tina, and Athena made the stem part for the flowers, Magali and Yeri made the white flowers, and Courtney and Samantha glued them together. Shout out to Courtney for bringing the scissors! 100 artificial flowers were made! 

Butterfly collection team: Though pipevine swallowtails were not sighted in the Arboretum, the team managed to acquire two cabbage whites and one western tiger swallowtail. Ideally, capturing a few specimens of pipevines would have allowed us to try and determine what specific conditions we need to create for them to keep them alive. But having these butterflies will also give us a good idea of what those practices could be. One positive thing that the team was able uncurl the proboscis and feed the butterflies. Self-feeding was not observed, but now we know that we can at least manually feed them. Shout out to Manu for getting the Gatorade, which the team used to spiritzed the butterfly.

Microbe teams: It was decided that each treatment solution, yeast and bacteria, will be prepared using 1 million cells in 40 ml of liquid. Grace counted yeast cells, I counted bacteria cells, Cameron did the math, and shout out to Sai for preparing and pouring over forty culture plates. 

Huge shout-out to all the teams for going above and beyond, staying past the session time to get everything done. That extra effort has significantly boosted our chances of having a successful experimental day. 

Where are we at now? 

We have artificial flowers that will have PCR tubes in the center with 0.5 ml of nectar. If everything goes well during incubation, we will have 40 ml of each treatment solution by Monday. We know how the experimental setup gonna look, and how we will take down the observations/readings. We also know that we can feed the butterflies manually.

What are the major concerns? 

We don't know if we will be able to acquire enough pipevine swallowtails to run the experiment. We also don't know exactly what conditions we need to keep the butterflies alive in captivity.  The status of butterflies in captivity on Sunday will give us a big insight into this matter. 

What's the plan?

1.) Check the status of butterflies in captivity on Sunday

2.) Collect butterflies on Sunday.

3.) Feed them manually on the control solution using artificial flowers, also label them

4.) If possible, feed them at night around 10 pm (I am down for it)

Scenario 1: If we catch butterflies on Sunday and they are alive on Monday

5.) On Monday, assemble the experimental setup by 10:20. If we get a lot of butterflies, few people come early and set up stuff. 

6.) Assign (ask) people certain roles/responsibilities during the trials. 

Scenario 2: They die in captivity:

5.) cry

6.) Two teams: One tries again to catch butterflies on Monday morning, the Second devours absolutely everything there is on the internet about keeping these fragile organisms alive.  

7.) Explore different possibilities of when we can conduct the experiment, or change the experiment based on voting 

Scenario 3: If we don't catch butterflies on Sunday:

5.) Try again Monday morning before class 

6.) If we get butterflies: feed them, explore different possibilities of when we can conduct the experiment

7.) If we don't get butterflies: first cry, then vote on what we can change?

In any case, I am 100% confident our group can navigate any obstacle.