November 14,

I first of all want to thank all the Round Rock HS Aquatic Science students that sent me emails! I really enjoyed them all. Please keep emailing if you have any more questions! I wish I knew more about Australian wildlife, but all I can think about right now are these corals (and echidnas, see below). And I'm making sure to #YOLO as much as I can ;)

I feel like I've been here for a long time now. I'm happy to report the Acropora millepora colonies have spawned!! It's been an interesting two night to say the least. I'll catch you up on the happenings.

Two nights ago, at 8PM we noticed two colonies that had 'set'. This just means that when you look at them in the water you can see their eggs sitting in their polyps. The colonies were isolated in bins and spawned around 9PM. For one of my experiments I wanted to cross one mom and one dad and and test different concentrations of the reagents I'm going to use for my knockdown experiment. The reagents that I'm using are pretty expensive, so I want to make sure that the larvae aren't all going to die at the concentrations I expose them to. I also want to see how long they can sit in this fairly small volume of water before dying. Because there are so many unknowns (no body has ever tried to do this before), I have many variables to test.

The first night with the two colonies. We collected eggs and sperm, washed them from each other, and crossed the gametes both way.

Collecting Acropora millepora gametes after spawning. 

We checked them for successful fertilization and guess what? Nothing. Just eggs and sperm, no cell division. We think that this might have been two fragments of the same colony that just got mixed up somehow or they were really sexually incompatible individuals. There's no way to know, it just didn't work!

Coral eggs and sperm (gametes) about to be washed. This is what it looks like when you collect it out of those isolation bins (see above pic). The pink/orange eggs float and the sperm is what makes the water all cloudy. 

So last night 7 colonies looked set and spawned really well. We did the whole thing. The team I'm working with is doing a quantitative genetics project that requires a lot of specific crosses (mom A X dad B, etc etc). This is one way to measure heritability of particular traits. For my stuff, I started my first experimental test last night and tonight is going to be a big experiment night for me. This experiment is attempting to knock down expression of fluorescent proteins in early embryos/larvae to see what function these proteins might have in this life-stage. Last night we finished at 3AM. Then I got up to check my experiment at 5AM and then again at 9AM and Ill need to check it again a few more times. 

Echidna. Freaking adorable. 

So, here's another dangerous animal (that is also super cute!). Echidna. This is probably my favorite animal in Australia. Echidnas are egg-laying mammals, a group called monotremes, which is pretty unique! The only other monotreme is platypus. Both of these make up the only mammals in the world that lay eggs. They are covered in spines to protect them from predators. When a predator approaches they curl up in a ball, exposing their spines. They are pretty adorable and you want to pick them up, but they will spike you so beware. Here's a sweet video about them: http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/weirdest-echidna. Another fun fact, male echidnas have a four headed penis. I'm not going to show you a picture of that one. The baby echidnas are called puggles. Adorbs.

Puggle (baby echidna) in front of mum (Perth Zoo)