WOW! What a day! We started off the day hunting for dandelions out at Prairie Ridge.  It took us a while to find them, but eventually we did!  Team Dirt dug up 30 dandelions and brought them back to the museum! After we brought them back to the museum Julia sterilized their roots in a 10% bleach solution and we got to replant the dandelions in our soils that we brought from home! We are all excited to get to see if our dandelions recruit some of the same symbiots to live in their microbiome.

Doctor Julia Stevens so excited to get a blooming dandelion!

Sterilizing roots in 10% bleach solution

Sifting my soil to plant my dandelions

Planting Dandelions!

In the middle of sterilizing the roots and planting the dandelions we got to go visit the museum’s vet lab, where we got to see them look for mycobacterium on a Black Banded Sunfish.  It was so neat getting to watch them anesthetize  a fish and take scale, gill, and fin samples.  Then we got to see them look at the samples up on a live microscope screen.  The whole time we got to hear what the  Vets were saying and ask them questions through microphones on the inside and out.  So cool!

After our visit with the vet we went back to the lab to continue setting up our experiment and a display to put in the front windows of the Genomics Lab.  By the end of the day the experiment was all set up and Team Dirt has an official display in the museum!!!

Team Dirt’s Display

Our Test Subjects!

Our Display!

After I left the museum for the evening I met up with some other Kenan Fellows to go to a Durham Bulls game! A home run was hit, and we got to see the famous Durham bull’s eyes light up and smoke come out his nostrils! And to top it all off the Bulls won! Yay!