Linksvayer Lab: end of Week 3

Hi my name is Ben Wagner and I've been working in the Linksvayer Lab at Penn. We work on evolutionary biology and collective decision making in ants.

My second and third weeks in the lab turned out to be very similar to the first. I'm still working on the genetics project, where we are finding differences in micro-satellites in the Pharaoh Ant colonies in the lab. This information is important for the future of the lab, because it will allow us to compare colonies genetically as well as behaviorally, and determine if certain actions/activities, such as one colony having twice as many queens although still being the same size as another (Pharaoh Ants are polygynous which means they have multiple queens); we then compare this to the genetic difference between the two or more colonies. My P.I. left this week to go to some conferences in Europe, where he'll be learning ant stinger dissection techniques, and talking with the top ant experts on the continent! But before he left he gave me new directions with my project, by which I mean he expanded it. I'm now doing about a dozen more colonies than my previously reported amount, as well as running gel electrophoresis in multiple samples from each colony to test if the PCR worked before submitting them for sequencing.

In total the lab week has been pretty slow. Most of the projects in the lab are coming to a close, so most of my fellow researchers are anxious to finish and start new projects. Although I know my project will not be finished anytime soon, I'll hopefully begin working on more behavioral based work, just to mix things up. Because of many projects almost being finished, everyone has had a little more time to hang out, so I got to know everyone in the lab a lot better, and we even went out for fro-yo after work one day. Unfortunately, we had to say good-bye to our lab tech Katie, who is leaving to go to grad school. But we're excited for our new lab tech Michael to be in charge because he's a really fun guy.

I haven't gotten a chance to return to the Berger lab yet, mainly because every time Riley's been there its been rather serious business. To remind you, Riley, my grad student, works in both Dr. Linksvayer evolutionary biology ant lab and Dr. Berger's epigentics in ants lab. So he's been over there trying to talk to Dr. Berger about his next steps not only in his project but in his future at the lab. This means I've had a lot more unsupervised lab work, to the point of Riley calling me "99%, if not completly, autonomous". I've also taken it upon myself to sign up for ant feeding, which as a temporary volunteer I'm not required to do, but I wanted to do my part. Its a rather long process, due to the hundred or so colonies of Pharaoh Ants and another 300-400 colonies of another type (which I can't remember because I don't use them). For both we need to give them new food and water, which is always interesting because they usually start making nests and climbing all over the test tubes they get water from.

I'm not expecting too much of a change this week, this Riley's going to be at an "ant meeting" all Monday and Tuesday, and with July being off... there will be mostly more of the same. But I am excited for the Penn/CHOP exp lunch Tuesday!