Howdy kids,
Well, it’s already three months in to the Magical Land of Honours, and EVERYBODY wants a piece of action!
Slowly, we bright young things are being transformed into caffeinated zombies (below), so grab your tin-foil hats, lest we catch you and try to suck your brains out through your earholes...
So lately we’ve given our preliminary presentations, which involved a fair amount of making stuff up as we went along and a mild amount of panicking, then we wrote our research and development proposals (more of the same...but with references!, below), and now we’re using our Amazing Multitasking Skills to simultaneously write our statistics assignment, our opinion article, and do our pilot studies within a disturbingly short amount of time.
Hurrah!
Oh, and we also need to ensure that we exhibit a level of excitement appropriate for honours at all times. Or else. (see below for examples of excited faces).
So what have I been doing? Well – mostly, I’ve been heating a plank (below). I might have mentioned previously that my project will be looking at insect thermal preferences in response to different kinds of starvation (there’s a book in the library – Badham, of course, the other libraries are irrelevant – called ‘Why is the world green’, I suggest that you read it). Well, one of the things about honours as I am discovering, is that you have to actually do stuff yourself! Argh! Where are the slaves? I used to have one...but she wants paying by the hour now. Damn.
So basically I’ve been spending a couple of hours in between writing paragraphs of my small army of assignments applying large amounts of heat to a slab of steel to create a thermal gradient. I’m on prototype 3 now - it’s suspended from retort stands over reptile heating lamps which are resting on a wire scaffold, and next week I aim to do a trial run with live locusts so that I can find out how many replicates I need (do Ecological Methods in third year to find out why replication is your friend!).
(ETA. Now it’s suspended over some metal shelves and when I turn it on, smells vaguely like Burning...]
After that I’ll be starting on my first experiment which involves depriving locusts of food for different amounts of time over 24 hours. Then there will be one more using starvation frequency, where I’ll have to stay at uni overnight because I intend to feed the locusts every few hours to see if there’s a difference between outright starvation and starvation frequency. The other four trials will look at different forms of nutrient deprivation – which occurs when the major nutrients (protein and carbohydrate) are diluted by compounds such as cellulose and lignin (used in plant cell walls) and tannin (a plant secondary metabolite). I also want to do some experiments where the locusts are infected with the fungus metharrizium or with blowfly maggots (YEEEEEEEEEEEEESSS!!!!) because it would be interesting to see how insects might cope with multiple threats to their survival via thermoregulatory measures.
As they say in Sandford, Gloucestershire we’re doing it for The Greater Good (but with fewer axes).
Tune in later for more appropriate levels of excitement!
Hooray.