POBR - Wellpinit Fair Grounds - Day 6

 

People of The Big River

Location: Wellpinit Fair Grounds

Day 6

Day six we got to stay on the campgrounds and do all kinds of things with our bacteria that we collected. We all had breakfast as usual, and we spent the majority of the day with Dr. Schuster learning about the methodology of why we’re taking the samples and how to do it properly. Some of what we wrote down for our methodology section which we are including on a poster that we also have to put together for our class include. Collecting 50 ml water samples at each site. Next, while using aseptic techniques to make sure that everything is kept sterile. We measured environmental parameters like testing for pH, nitrates, and we measured water temperature. We also inoculated the bacteria on general media (yellow) NUT - TTC molecules or pigments that stain red if there is fecal matter found. As well as selective media Mackokely agar (red) which breaks down complex sugars and allows growth of gram-negative bacteria and inhibits gram positive bacteria from growing on the bio paddles. After that we incubated everyone’s bio paddles for roughly 39 hours. After that we did bacterial isolation that we took from the bio paddles, what we did was that we selected a colony from both NUT – TTC and MAC side of the bio paddles on a petri dish with sterile technique. Something I had never done before, but it was really cool getting to do this part. Dr. Schuster showed us how to spread the colonies so that they would grow a certain way on the petri dish. We did a sort of zigzag motion while rotating the dish, this way we are able to see everything as it grows starting off with a third being more concentrated and the other two sides having even less. After this we put the Petri dishes back into the incubator to let them grow.

We also started our posters like I mentioned before, Dr. Black showed us how to set up the poster and we were able to fill in the methodology section. She talked about a lot of the sites we had been to and how everything connects, while Dr. Schuster added things about the microbiological portion of our project. Why there might be certain bacteria in the different creeks and rivers we’ve been testing and how the different tests that we do in the future will help us narrow down what exactly is in the water. We also put all of our data we collected on the environmental parameters of each site into one collective spread sheet. I kind of liked this it felt like a scavenger hunt trying to put together all of the information, especially because we had to do some conversions and include GPS coordinates. It was a very busy day, but we learned a lot and got to do some pretty cool things. After this we had some down time had dinner which was chicken teriyaki and brownies for dessert, we finished the day by watching some movies and that was all for day six.

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