I shadowed Jenny today and helped her vacuum filter chlorophyll out of water samples from Falls Lake. The process was the same as what I did on day two with total suspended solids (TSS), but it had to be done under a special green light. While she was filtering everything I wrote down the results and handed her the sample bottles.
(The 300+ stickers I cut yesterday were used in this process & I cut around 80 more today)
I also met their data manager, Carol, and she talked to me about how she runs the website and creates all the spreadsheets/graphs for their research projects. She uses a program called Surfer to make most of the graphs and her data sheets typically run between 15,000-60,000 rows (per graph). The data she collects comes from on site probes, and they currently have probes on Falls Lake and in High Point.
In the afternoon I watched Lisa work with cultivating e coli samples for one of the other people in the lab. Each week the lab cultivates another e coli dish and keeps it in a refrigerator so further tests can be done. The e coli is grown on some processed sheep blood which I found pretty cool. (It smelled horrible)
Image 1: Vacuum filter
Image 2: One of the Graphs Karen made
Image 3: Excel sheet for the graph
Image 4: E Coli sample
