First day as a graduate student...
And I must say, it went very well :)
I only had two classes today (one of which was a lab), but of course have to spend the evening in the library, where I'm anticipating spending many a night.
Both of my professors appears to be interesting, animated (one perhaps a little too animated, might be time for decaf...) people, and even though I'm only one of two graduate students in both classes, I still think I'll be stimulated and challenged enough without needing any extra work (which I was told probably won't be given to us). Wow, how's that for a sentence!
I'm especially pleasantly surprised by my Conservation Biology class. I've heard rumors about other Conservation Biology classes, in that they typically involve a lot of personal opinion and politics on the part of the professor. Often, students will take the class because they aren't interested in doing a lot of work. However, because my professor has a strong background in Population Genetics, he will be using that as the backbone of the class; so it will include much more of a scientific method to solve problems for species management than I think most studies had realized, which suits me just fine. I like how he referred to Population Genetics as the "Light Side" of biology because it's the study of abundance, whereas Conservation Biology is the "Dark Side" of biology because it monitors the death of a species. So I guess this semester I'm going over to the Dark Side. Hehehe...ahem...anyway..... I guess you need to be a biologist to find that funny :P
My master's project is also evolving (haha! get it! evolving! oh, I kill me...) quite well and I'm already tying together concepts in my head which would eventually compose my thesis. I'm going to be studying pheromones and their role in the reproductive behaviors in cephalopods, specifically the pheromones found in eggs. This project is part of a major NSF grant that my advisor, along with a few other scientists, are using for research. Although all coleoid cephalopods are primarily visual animals, they also rely on chemical means for communication. So far early research has shown that octopuses, squids, and cuttlefish will all show some type of arousal behavior when presented with either eggs or water which had eggs in it. Now by arousal I don't mean sexual. I mean a heightened state of activity. However it seems to be different in each type of animal, which makes sense because each type of animal has a different set of sexual behaviors, so they should react differently to eggs.
The most research on this (and most is misleading, because really, not enough has been done, and studies have only started fairly recently) has been done with squid, esp. Loligo pealeii. In these studies, the males will become aggressive with one another after touching the eggs. Only just recently, my advisor and some of her students started testing octopuses and cuttlefish. In octopuses, which are solitary, highly cannibalistic animals that only approach conspecifics to mate, preliminary results definitely show a response to egg pheromones in that the animals' respiration rates significantly increase when presented with water which had previously contained eggs. The results are less conclusive in cuttlefish. These animals were sub-adults which were tested using a Y-maze with the hopes that they would've tried tracking the pheromone to the scent source, indicating a preference. However, the cuttlefish did become more active in the presence of the pheromone.
Since those same cuttlefish are now older and sexually mature, my first order of business in the lab will be to see if age and maturity will improve these results. It would be nice to create a strong case for the importance of pheromones in reproductive communication for a variety of reasons in cephalopods. I think it would make an awesome thesis to show how a type of peptide pheromone evolved from one animal phylum, or perhaps even class depending on how unique it is, we won't know until the proteins have been identified, to suit the needs of animals with very different reproductive lifestyles.
Anyway, that's enough of me bio-geeking out. I just wanted to let you know what I'll be doing this year. For the most part, any other specific technical knowledge that occurs in the lab will be posted to my Ceph. Blog on Blogger or my Ceph. LJ.
I only had two classes today (one of which was a lab), but of course have to spend the evening in the library, where I'm anticipating spending many a night.
Both of my professors appears to be interesting, animated (one perhaps a little too animated, might be time for decaf...) people, and even though I'm only one of two graduate students in both classes, I still think I'll be stimulated and challenged enough without needing any extra work (which I was told probably won't be given to us). Wow, how's that for a sentence!
I'm especially pleasantly surprised by my Conservation Biology class. I've heard rumors about other Conservation Biology classes, in that they typically involve a lot of personal opinion and politics on the part of the professor. Often, students will take the class because they aren't interested in doing a lot of work. However, because my professor has a strong background in Population Genetics, he will be using that as the backbone of the class; so it will include much more of a scientific method to solve problems for species management than I think most studies had realized, which suits me just fine. I like how he referred to Population Genetics as the "Light Side" of biology because it's the study of abundance, whereas Conservation Biology is the "Dark Side" of biology because it monitors the death of a species. So I guess this semester I'm going over to the Dark Side. Hehehe...ahem...anyway..... I guess you need to be a biologist to find that funny :P
My master's project is also evolving (haha! get it! evolving! oh, I kill me...) quite well and I'm already tying together concepts in my head which would eventually compose my thesis. I'm going to be studying pheromones and their role in the reproductive behaviors in cephalopods, specifically the pheromones found in eggs. This project is part of a major NSF grant that my advisor, along with a few other scientists, are using for research. Although all coleoid cephalopods are primarily visual animals, they also rely on chemical means for communication. So far early research has shown that octopuses, squids, and cuttlefish will all show some type of arousal behavior when presented with either eggs or water which had eggs in it. Now by arousal I don't mean sexual. I mean a heightened state of activity. However it seems to be different in each type of animal, which makes sense because each type of animal has a different set of sexual behaviors, so they should react differently to eggs.
The most research on this (and most is misleading, because really, not enough has been done, and studies have only started fairly recently) has been done with squid, esp. Loligo pealeii. In these studies, the males will become aggressive with one another after touching the eggs. Only just recently, my advisor and some of her students started testing octopuses and cuttlefish. In octopuses, which are solitary, highly cannibalistic animals that only approach conspecifics to mate, preliminary results definitely show a response to egg pheromones in that the animals' respiration rates significantly increase when presented with water which had previously contained eggs. The results are less conclusive in cuttlefish. These animals were sub-adults which were tested using a Y-maze with the hopes that they would've tried tracking the pheromone to the scent source, indicating a preference. However, the cuttlefish did become more active in the presence of the pheromone.
Since those same cuttlefish are now older and sexually mature, my first order of business in the lab will be to see if age and maturity will improve these results. It would be nice to create a strong case for the importance of pheromones in reproductive communication for a variety of reasons in cephalopods. I think it would make an awesome thesis to show how a type of peptide pheromone evolved from one animal phylum, or perhaps even class depending on how unique it is, we won't know until the proteins have been identified, to suit the needs of animals with very different reproductive lifestyles.
Anyway, that's enough of me bio-geeking out. I just wanted to let you know what I'll be doing this year. For the most part, any other specific technical knowledge that occurs in the lab will be posted to my Ceph. Blog on Blogger or my Ceph. LJ.