We have finally made it into the second week of being in Oregon. It’s been an exciting journey so far, going from rocky shores to seemingly barren mudflats (they were in fact full of life). Today though, I along with my lab partners, spent time in the lab hard at work! The course is more than just going to sites to look at animals, we spent just as much time in lab examining them, as well as working on our projects. A key part of our journey out west is to also be able to perform an experiment of our own design.
Today, after having been to all the locations, we began to fully dedicate our time to conducting our experiments. Other groups had to go back into the field to do theirs, but as for my group, we spent hours in the lab running ours. We are looking at olive snail digging and movement speeds, which if you don’t know, snails can dig (and quite fast at that). Actually taking the time to sit down and run an experiment can be a very frustrating procedure, especially when working with snails that liked to take their sweet old time before moving. Yet doing research is a crucial part of science and has an extremely satisfying feeling when you finally finish it all, as we did today, and getting the results you were hoping for is just the icing on the cake. Overall, while going out and seeing the coast is an extremely fun part of the trip, being able to get hands-on experience and running our own experiment is just as equally fun!