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Day 8 @CAAE: last day :(

Today I am starting out with cutting and peeling the stickers off the tacos that usually hold chlorophyll samples and then putting them back into the taco bag to be reused later.

Done with all 300 tacos!

These digest tubes of TKN are mixed by a Vortex Mixer and put in a digest block to then be analyzed for total organic nitrogen.

(see attached link below)

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The purpose of spinning and putting the TKN samples into the digest block is to change the total organic nitrogen to ammonia.

Because this is my last day, I had to get a picture of the amazing crew that mentored me!

CAAE gave me an amazing 8 days; hopefully, I can go back a couple times during the summer and help around the lab. I’m so grateful I had the opportunity to meet all of these lovely people and work in their profession. I learned an awful lot in a short amount of time, but it was 100% worth it and a really cool work experience that I would recommend to anyone interested in this line of work.

Day 7 @CAAE

Because today is my sister’s 5th-grade graduation and I am having to leave early for it, I was given the work of a true intern.

I was tasked with hole punching all of the data reports for TKN, SRP, nitrate, TP, and ammonia and filing them in their corresponding notebooks.

Done!

Then I got to play with an AR sandbox. This is used to understand topography, watersheds, and where water runoff and rain will end up.

WATCH THIS SUPER COOL VIDEO BELOW!

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Day 6 @CAAE

Today I am working with someone who is an algal bloom specialist. Deluded full strength seawater with Q water and stirred it with a stir bar on a magnetic machine that stirs it by itself. (see attached link below)

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This was then put into an autoclave that uses steam to sterilize anything you put into it. The purpose of putting the natural seawater in there is to ensure a decontaminated media for algal culturing. Now we are aseptically dispensing sterile media into culture flasks to prepare for inoculating fresh culture. This is all being done because it is time for the biweekly culture transfer. This is a mechanical pipetter; the top button sucks up the media and the bottom one pushes it out and is connected to an external power source. These processes are more biological than chemical so the measurements are less precise.

Day 5 @CAAE

This morning I was showed the results from the TSS samples I tested on last Thursday. From this, we learned that the lab duplicate that I made and tested had failed but was very close to passing. I was informed that it wasn’t how I did it and that it would have just been something in the water that caused a bigger difference in weight; for example, a small stick.

Then I was put to work in the lab. I threw out the old filter sheets, ordered the tins they were in, put them in the right spot in the drawer, took out 60 of those tins, then got 60 new filters. With those new filters, I washed them with deionized water and put them in the tins.

Once they were all put into the tins they were placed in the oven to get dried before they can get weighed before they can get used.

Once the filter sheets came out I weighed and recorded them on a data sheet.

To finish off the day, I worked with four SRP samples and the quAAtro machine. My results will come out tomorrow.

Day 4 @CAAE

The SRP samples analysis that I set up and ran yesterday on the quAAtro came out after we left yesterday. All of the initial setups that affect the rest of the run tested perfect and or right in the range of what they should be.

Today I was shown the process and set up for chlorophyll a filtration.

The process is similar to TSS filtering, in that you concentrate on a known volume of sample onto a filter sheet and use all the same materials. This process measures the amount of algal biomass in a water system. Chlorophyll a is a photosynthetic pigment found in plants and algae and has to be tested for in the dark with only green lights to illuminate without heat or bright lights that are usually on.

This is what the datasheet looks like for five samples taken from Oak Hollow and High Point reservoirs.

Day 3 @CAAE

The first thing we did was calibrate the scale, weigh the washed filter sheets, and weigh the baked filtered sheets with TSS on it.

This is the final compiled data after baking and weighing filter sheets with TSS from water taken from Falls Lake and Lake Wheeler, which we tested on Tuesday, May 28th.

We had 4 more samples of water from Lake wheeler that came in yesterday and we tested today. This test includes one daily dry filter, one filter solely filtered with water, one lab duplicate, and the 4 standard samples.

Taking a break to enter the data from Tuesday’s filtering, we went into Joy-Lynn’s cubical and she showed me her super cool ergonomic chair!

After lunch, endures the long process of writing down the layout of both stormwater and Neuse River SRP (orthophosphate) samples and typing them in for the auto-analyzer to run.

Day 2 @CAAE

Today I am crunching numbers while the rest of the staff takes a CPR class from 10-4.
For this first stack, I am adding all the rows and then totaling those rows at the very bottom. These pages are called EPA NLA Phytoplankton Data Sheets.
For the second stack, I am multiplying certain specific values listed by two and recording them on a data sheet that compiles the final numbers. The pages on the left are blank for the calculated results made on the other page; the pages on the right are the data sheets for the silica analysis run we did yesterday and are also used for the several calculations made. I don’t have a picture but I also made a total of 800 copies of different documents during my breaks.

I finished calculating and writing the results down for the analysis of the silica tests from yesterday.
I also finished 21 of the phytoplankton data sheets.
However, I still have probably over 100 more left for another day.
At the end of a long day, my hard work was rewarded by a Gauze Roll Stretch Band from the CPR class that was kindly thrown at me from the doorway. I guess I’ll always be prepared now 🙂

Day 1 @CAAE

Welcome to the NC State Center For Applied Aquatic Ecology!

Here are some machines that I learned how to use today as well as some important processes to remember:

Testing template for silica in water and seawater

High purity water machine

quAAtro machine flushing and stabilizing before analyzing [the quAAtro machine is also referred to as the Continuous-Flow Injection Auto-Analyzer] (see attached link below)

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32 silica samples taken from falls lake for a student working on her PhD

Testing for total suspended solids from falls lake with labeled water samples and glass microfiber filters

quAAtro machine analyzing silica samples from falls lake (see attached link below)

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TSS filtering in process (see attached link below)

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Data recorded from the filtering- includes filter paper number, filter paper weight in milligrams, volume of water added, and sample name. The filter and residue weight will be measured Thursday after the filter paper is dried in the oven at 104.1°C. The samples included 3 field duplicates usually meaning they were collected using the same collecting methods and for every ten samples, we did a lab duplicate to see if our filtering methods yielded consistent results. Gathering all the data from filtering took 3 hours, which did not include weighing 30 glass microfiber filters before which took another full hour!

These are the glass microfiber filters after filtering the lake samples