The rest of the Fall 2019 semester went by fast. Shortly after the volunteer reef cleanup, I became the founding president of the AMU Snorkel and Scuba Club and joined a professor in his study of bioluminescent marine bacteria. In its first semester, Snorkel and Scuba club started slow. We waited a couple months to get approved and tried to run a small snorkeling trip ourselves during that time. Just a few days before our adventurers went on their way, the club became officialized and complications arose! As a now official club trying to run an event, a month-in-advance event approval had to be met, forms signed, and a school approved vehicle and driver procured. Long story short, the staff member heading student clubs provided us the forms, the club advisor--wouldn't you know it, Dr. Serson again--partnered with the Biology chair to give us the green light to run our event under the Biology department, I provided the vehicle, and one of the tripgoers (a school approved driver) volunteered to drive the 6 students to and from their destination. Phew!
After that, our club spent a month planning, preparing, and setting up a 40-student capacity event that would introduce students to scuba diving on our own campus. The event was run under a world-renowned diving instruction organization--PADI--as its introductory diving course, "Discover Scuba". The participating students greatly enjoyed their experience and both our club members and the dive shop were looking forward to running the event again in future semesters. Hopefully we'll run one in this Spring 2020 semester!
As for the volunteer lab project with the professor I mentioned earlier, that was cool. We obtained live samples of bacteria from a sample of the shrimp Pandalus platyceros, the spotted shrimp. Since I may not write an individual article on this shrimp species, I encourage you to read a short but fun and highly educational article on it here:
Isolating these bacteria was a foreign process to me before the privilege of doing the task. First, a fun fact--there are bacteria all around you! They're floating in the air, moseying along on surfaces, and even roomed inside of you (but don't worry. Most of them are probably good for you and your immune system lets them visit). This meant a couple things: first, I couldn't always trust what I saw; leaving a container of bacteria open on a desk for too long could mean that those flying bacteria (yes, they're real) would decide to stay and infect a previously non-mixed culture (a bacteria culture is like a little "village" of bacteria you grow for science experiments). Second, I had to keep my samples straight. A plate of bacteria that looked freshly fixed with one species could actually have thousands of species if I had accidentally mixed bacteria samples! Now, I have a confession to make. I'm a bit of a ditz, and occasionally drift off in thought or don't analyze my surroundings as well as I should. This doesn't fit well in a lab! But my professor was very understanding, and I believe I can improve with time.
So millions of bacteria species can be on one small area or one plate, and it can be very hard to tell them apart if they're newly placed or, say, clinging onto a shrimp where they're not exactly easy to point out. They can, however, be diluted in a game of chance, numbers, and science (thankfully the last two usually win over chance). If you have a swab of a million bacteria species and you're looking to separate the glowy ones, you first put them in water, swirl them around to "suspend" them in solution, and take 10% dilutions, or smaller concentrations, of the bacteria. Then you take 10% of the previous 10%, and keep repeating until you get less, and less, and more spread out bacteria. What then? You swirl them potter's-wheel style on a plate full of scrumptious bacteria chow to grow--and glow! It did happen to be very helpful that our species of interest, and there was the chance we'd find multiple species, glowed. All we had to do was swab glowing species and spread them on new plates, repeating the incubation process afterwards. Bacteria that didn't glow could be eliminated from our selection process.
It seemed as though I did an acceptable job in my professor's lab, as he felt we had isolated a couple different species from a starting point of possibly millions of bacterial species. Unfortunately, I didn't get to learn what the species were and experience DNA testing as part of the discovery process; we ran out of time as the semester came to an end. But I may still be able to find out what little buggers we'd found as he continues his research!
See the photos below for an example of what the bacteria looked like.
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