Rutgers WAre Lab - Week 5 (Last week!)

Hi everyone, this is Michael and I've been working in Ware Lab at Rutgers. We focus on studying the body and shape of dragonflies and damselflies.

Coming back from the weekend, I started off with creating draft phylogenetic trees for my Orthetrum leg sample. This time, however, instead of a single cycle, I adjusted the program to create a draft tree for 100 cycles and pick the best tree. This would prove that I had not related my sample with Orthetrum by chance. This took a long time, since I was comparing my sample with about 20 other Odonata. Creating a tree for one cycle itself took about 15 minutes. Gettign a best tree, with 100 cycles, would took a couple hour; basically it was lots of waiting for the tree.

On Tuesday, I got to go on a field trip to catch some dragonflies for the lab. I was lucky since the day before had been raining the whole time, and now it was quite wet outside. Will taught me two basic ways of catching dragonflies: when they were resting on something, you can sneak up to them and and catch them with a net in a burst of action; the other way, when they are flying around, is to simply chase and swing your net around, hoping that you will catch one. (This way is especially exhausting - there was one dragonfly that totally drove my crazy; I was exhausted at the point when I decide to give it up). When you manage to catch one, there will be buzzing noise coming from the dragonfly trying to escape, so you can tell if you catch one. One thing to keep in mind is that be sure to fold your net and seal its opening; dragonflies can escape if you don't.

Anyway, at the end of the day, I caught about 9 dragonflies, including a lot of blue dashers (since they were literally everywhere for some reason), a couple other species, and a metal hawk, which people from my lab had never caught one before.

For the rest of the week, I made more draft trees for my other samples. My professor said that she will probably publish a paper on my discovery with the Orthetrum, and we were all excited about this news.

Overall, this has been a really nice experience for me. I got to experience the environment in college labs, and got some idea about what do people do in lab, how do they get money for research (for this, there was a grad students in the lab,Melissa , who was recruited by National Geographic by writing a proposal to them), how do they find topics to work with, etc. I'm really glad that my professor offered me this opportunity, and along with the lab members for guiding me through my works.