User talk:Lexi Jenkins/Notebook/Biology 210 at AU

3/21/2015

Your intro was good. In the methods section, you need to state the concentration of ethanol that you used and on what days you changed solutions and fed the fish. It was good that you kept track of hatching, though I noticed that you had more than 20 fish - were some of the dead eggs just leftover egg cases from the embryos that had hatched? It is difficult to collect data when your fish die, but you mentioned that you were able to preserve some. For those, you should have quantitative data, like length and eye size. If you have these measurements, you should say how many fish you were able to measure and if it is more than one, calculate a mean and standard deviation. Your survival and hatching data can be made into tables and/or graphs for the paper. LS

3/7/2015 You should paste the raw sequences into your lab notebook. Also, you didn't compare the known characteristics of the species you found (which should have a citation) to how you characterized the samples back in table 2 of the bacteria lab. I don't know which samples you sequenced and if they were from tet or non-tet plates. LS

2/22/2015

Vert lab - Good job on coming up with animals that might use your transect. On the food web, it is better to separate the organisms a bit rather than writing something like bacteria/archaea/crickets. I would also separate plants from dead animals. We didn't actually try to identify Archaea, so leave those off, but include protists and algae!

Invert lab - For the most part, very good. The section on worms was a bit confusing, however. All of the worms are invertebrates, but the Planaria are flatworms (a coelomates), which you only saw in cross-section. Nematodes are pseudocoelomates, and Annelids/earthworms are coelomates. Also, I don't think you measured your invertebrates correctly. 100 mm = 10 cm = about 4 inches. Animals that size would not have fallen through the mesh of your Berlese funnel. The springtail should only be about 6 mm long. LS

2/15/2015 This is good, you covered everything in the lab manual. Your tree, though, is not a gymnosperm. Any tree that drops leaves in the winter (except for gingko or redwood) is an angiosperm - gymnosperms are mainly things like pine trees. Also, for your lab report try to find the scientific names for your vegetables and try to narrow down the type of tree you have (maple? cedar?) LS

2/9/2015 Much better! The only thing missing for lab 3 is a description of the mechanism of action of tetracycline. LS

2/6/2015

Now that I have found your notebook, I can make comments! I rearranged the order so that the newest entry is at the top. Please continue to write it this way.

For lab 1, you needed to include your transect map and the list of 5 biotic and 5 abiotic components.

For lab 2, you needed to describe how the Hay Infusion was made and your initial observations - what did it look and smell like, etc. You also needed pictures or drawings of the protists.

For lab 3, you are missing the serial dilution table. If you check the TA notebook page, there are directions for how to turn an excel table into a wiki table. Or you could take a picture of it and upload that or paste in a link to it. The methods were very well-written. For the description of bacteria, even if you don't want to make a table you could list them, so I would know if the filamentous was also Gram +. You are also missing a description of the colony that each of the 4 types came from. I know you are doing a lot in lab, but the data is the most important part! LS