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Oh the things I have learned.... |
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Premeditation Thinking ahead before going ahead with a project may seem like a no-brainer, but sometimes it is easy to get carried away in the excitement of having the opportunity to carry out your own plans. Practical and logical thinking escaped me once I had come up with my initial plan. I had originally intended to include a "disturbance" element to the design by choosing two locations (one high wave action, and one low wave action) in which to set up the control and fertilized pads. However, when scouting for experimental sites at Nahant, I happened to find ones that were somewhat remote and difficult to access. I also set up the scrubber pads in the lowest part of the intertidal zone. When the time came to collect the data, it was a freezing cold November day, with wind and sleet that seemed to have conspired together to make my cheeks feel like a pin cushion. The sites were not only dangerous to reach, but were also being pummeled with three foot waves right about where I had set my pads. The high wave action area was hopeless, but I managed to retrieve two of the six scrubbers from the low disturbance area and luckily one was fertilized, and one was not. I placed each one in plastic zip-lock bags and once I was back at school I carefully poured 150 ml of water in each one to get the organisms out of the environment. Perfect! I was all set to go, except I had used FRESH water! The hypotonic situation probably caused lysing in the soft bodies organisms. And not only that, because I couldn't collect the data right away, the organisms began to decompose and algae detritus grew making my samples unrecognizable. It never even occurred to me that I should have tried to preserve them. Promptness Working with the tides severely limited the opportunities for data collection, especially since the ocean was an hour and a half away. The tides wait for no one. Tides that were relatively low, occurring during daylight hours AND fit into my schedule, were rare indeed. By the time I decided I wanted to reset the experiment, there was very little room to wait for the perfect tide, I had to use what I could. That meant only setting the pads out for a week at Odiorne State Park, and collecting them at 6 am when the sun was not quite risen, but it would at least have been somewhat light out. Unfortunately, upon collecting the second experiment I was running a little late, and even though I had not placed the pads so low in the intertidal, I arrived just in time to see three foot waves teasing my by exposing my experiment momentarily just before crashing down. Preparation I spent a month worrying about whether or not my pads would be at Nahant or if they would have been swept away into the ocean. During this time I could have been looking for methodology about preserving specimen of zooplankton, reviewing ways to perform systematic diversity analysis, or setting up another experiment as a back-up. My greatest regret is that I assumed I had thought of everything. My plan was so simple and straight forward, I never expected anything to go wrong. Because I was unprepared for this, when I realized I had made so many mistakes I panicked and became frustrated instead of attempting to make it right again.
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