As I'm sure you've already read, we just finished an intense week at FGCU's Vester Marine Field Station in Bonita Springs. Each day a different professor from Florida Gulf Coast University tried their best to compress all of their knowledge into an hour lecture for each subject. I think they did a great job as we all learned quite a bit this week from geology, physical oceanography, and microbiology to seagrass and oyster reef ecology. Our trips out into the field were both fun and informative. What I liked most about this week was the variety of different field research methods and analytic techniques we learned and how they can be applied to answer different research questions. We learned core sampling of sediment, how to analyze current in an estuary, binary analysis of a community, and how to use a quadrat to study seagrass abundance.
The most interesting method I learned about this week was using EcoPlates with Dr. Toshi Urakawa. An
EcoPlate is a square plate with 32 small wells filled with 31 carbon sources for analyzing microbial communities. When a well changes color, it means the bacteria are using that particular carbon source contained in the well. Added together, the colored wells leave a fingerprint of the bacterial community present in the sample. Unfortunately, our samples taken from the core sediment did not react with the EcoPlates all that well but it was useful to learn about nonetheless.
Pipetting sample into EcoPlate:
A colored up EcoPlate:
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