the Earth-bound adventures of the Lost and Found

By that I mean that so far, I haven't broken any pipettes or dropped any DO meters into the sea, even though the boys keep sending me off into the banca by myself to get the offshore samples (because I'm the lightest, they say). Even though I would be facing my zoology class a few hours later, and I wasn't dressed to get wet, and the waves were splashing over my head, and sh*t was floating right beside me along with algae and seagrass because we had to get the samples near a very dirty river, and we had to suck the reagents with our mouths to pipette them into the test tubes because we have only ONE grotty rubber aspirator in the whole lab, and we had to use a tank (for diving) to filter our samples because we don't have any proper filtering equipment.... But who would mind all that when class work means sitting at the boulevard on a friday morning drinking beer while we figure out if it wouldn't be better to borrow the kayak at the corner store to get our samples, ...

So okay, by now you'll really think I'm a nerd (and I even have a video of my Spirulina oscillating under the microscope to show for it =P). But really, I think it's just a matter of opening our minds to see the fascinating in the boring. Joy for me now is wading through calf-deep mud to get a scoop of slime and discovering that it's a rare species of algae sought-after for its high protein properties.And then being able to isolate them from the diatoms and other blue-green algae through moist culture. Who would have thought I'd find an affinity with microscopic algae? Welcome to the mind-twisting world of the marine botany lab....