Mustard and I hope that you had a great Christmas and New Year -  we certainly did!

We're back in the lab, sorting some more wasp specimens. Today we also sent a bunch of PCR samples to the Australian Genome Research Facility for sequencing.

Some of these samples include DNA we extracted from wasps that were sent to us by a citizen scientist! Head here to learn about our citizen science project, The Caterpillar Conundrum!

You can also check out how we extract the DNA, and how we run a PCR!

Mustard and I are geared up to give our conference talk today! Hopefully no one asks tricky questions...

They do. It's often the only time they get to meet up with collaborators or other people in their field face-to-face. Scientific conferences are generally a few days in length, and most of the people going will either give a talk about their work or make a poster, which will hang in the conference venue for people to read. 

Conferences are an awesome opportunity to introduce yourself to people you might want to collaborate with in the future, meet some peers in a similar field, or get a chance to talk to that semi-famous scientist whose papers you've cited a hundred times but never met. Sometimes it's also just really nice to get out of the office/lab and get re-inspired by the creative research other people are doing!

Mustard and I are at the joint conference of the Society of Australian Systematic Biologists and the Invertebrate Biodiversity and Conservation group in Fremantle, WA. 

The first day of the conference was a workshop on career development that was targeted primarily for PhD and early career researchers, and women in particular. It was run by the amazing Dr. Nerida Wilson of the Western Australian Museum, and had some great speakers giving us tips on everything from grant writing to balancing your work and your life. We had sessions on networking, abstract writing, mental resilience for working in science, and some suggestions for job applications and managing your career path. It was a pretty useful day, and a great opportunity to meet some other cool female scientists in a relaxed setting.

Tomorrow the conference begins properly!

The last couple of weeks have been full of exciting stuff - lab work! We'll take you through what we're doing in the lab step-by-step very soon, but today Mustard just wanted to share a photo of him taking notes in our lab book.

Scientists need to keep very careful notes about what they do in the lab. This is firstly just for themselves - it's hard to remember exactly what protocol or procedure you did last week, let along three years down the track. Secondly, when you publish your results in a scientific journal, you need to write in the methods - which means you need to keep a good record of what you did! Thirdly, if another scientist tries to replicate your results and fails, having detailed notes about all the different successes and failures you had in the lab along the way can help sort out what's going on. 

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Today we started sorting some of the specimens that are in our lab fridges. These specimens are stored in ethanol, which helps preserve the DNA of the insects. We are sorting through the wasps in the vials to pull out any of the microgastrines (the wasps we are studying) so that we can use them in our project.

These wasps have come from a Bush Blitz survey. Bush Blitz is Australia's largest nature discovery project - teams of scientists head out to remote locations all over Australia and build a catalogue of the flora and fauna of that area. Over 900 new species have been discovered on Bush Blitz surveys since they began in 2010! If you're a teacher, you can even head out with the scientists and teach live back to your classroom, sharing your discoveries with your class! 

Today Mustard and I helped out Adelaide Compass to run an insect workshop at Murray Bridge South Primary School. It was a lot of fun! We talked to the year two students about insects and what being a scientist is like, and then we did the School of Ants Citizen Science Experiment together.

The School of Ants experiment is very cool - we put out three different types of food (Frankfurt sausages, scotch finger biscuits and cotton balls dipped in sugar solution) and waited to see what ants would be attracted to the food. After an hour, we counted the ants on each bit of food and then collected the ants to send to the School of Ants headquarters. 

We found that the ants seemed to equally like sugared cotton balls and sausage, but there were always less ants on the biscuits. You can try the experiment at home and find out what food the ants in your backyard like the best!

We finished off the workshop by looking at some preserved and pinned insects with magnifying glasses - it was great to be out of the office and helping students learn about insects!

Also this week we were re-inducted into the molecular lab. The molecular lab is where we will extract and process the DNA from the wasps we collect. There were lots of safety and policy rules to be reminded of - we learnt when we needed to wear a lab coat, where the chemicals were, where the fire extinguishers are kept and what can and can't be taken into different labs. One room is a very clean room, in which no DNA is allowed so that you don't contaminate other researchers' work. A second room is used mainly just for DNA extractions (getting the DNA out of the insects) and the third room is for PCR (we'll talk more about this later, but it's when you take a certain section of the DNA that you're interested in, for example a gene that determines eye colour, and multiply that section many many times). 

So now we're all ready to start doing some lab work!

Sorry we've been so quiet for so long! It's been busy and hectic in the PhD world the last few weeks - but Mustard's here to fill you in on what we've been up to!

We went to some bioinformatic workshops, including learning how to talk to the computer in scripting language. Bioinformatics is a combination of computer science and statistics focussed on understanding and analysing huge amounts of biological data, like genetic sequences. It's a booming field because lab scientists (like me!) are generating huge amounts of genetic data that they don't know how to deal with. Bioinformaticians work out how to process the data and turn it into something usable. 

We also gave a talk at our weekly lab group meeting on our project, as a practice for the presentation we need to give at the University as part of our PhD program, and also for a conference in December. 

We also took a week off to deliver science holiday workshops at the South Australian Museum as part of their Opals exhibition. The opals exhibition is pretty awesome, so you should definitely check it out if you're in Adelaide!

Meanwhile, we've been doing lots of work at the microscope, and are getting pretty good at identifying the wasps!

Last Friday night, Mustard and I attended a BioBlitz at Morialta Conservation Park, run by the Discovery Circle. It was great fun! We set up a light trap to attract insects, and helped people collect and identify the critters that came to visit us. 

A light trap is a white sheet hung between two trees, with a bright light strung up in front of it. The light we used was a mercury vapour light, which produces lots of the UV light that insects are attracted to. Exactly why insects are attracted to bright lights, such as your porch light at home during the evening, or our light trap, is not definitively known. 

Theories include:

• The insects might use the moon to navigate by, and man-made lights confuse them
• A light source might be confused as a 'clear path', so insects are heading towards the light so to not bump into obstacles
• Perhaps insects are attracted to UV light because flowers also reflect UV light? 
  

Whatever the reason, we had lots of tiny moths and flies come land on our sheet!

There were plenty of other things happening at the BioBlitz - spider surveys, bat surveys, spotlighting possums and birds, nocturnal ant hunting... it was fantastic to see so many families heading out around the park with scientists. Data from any identified animals and plants was uploaded to The Atlas of Living Australia, which is a great place to find out what lives around you! It is also a great site to upload anything you see (and know what it is). If you find something and want help getting it identified, head to BowerBird, where there is a great community of people uploading sightings to projects and helping each other identify things from photographs.

BioBlitz brought lots of great organisations together. There were even some educational displays about how feral animals (like cats and foxes) cause so much damage to our native wildlife. Mustard was not so keen on the taxidermy cat. 

BioBlitz was a bunch of fun - thanks to the Discovery Circle for having us! There are more BioBlitzs coming up later in the year - find out more about them here, and head out to learn more about our amazing environment!

Checking out more wasps today, and came across this crazy specimen, which I had to share with you - and it made for a great opportunity to show you the automontage camera mentioned in my last post!

Spot anything unusual on the wasp above? She's pretty sandy and dirty, but if you look around the wing area on her body, you might spot some mites! Mites and ticks are in the group Acarina. They have eight legs, no antennae and no segmentation of the abdomen (their body all looks like one piece). The wasp above is a parasitoid... and these wasps are probably acting as parasites, feeding off the wasp. Parasite inception! 

The photo above shows the camera and the flashes used to take the picture of the wasp. Mustard is checking out the wasp specimen (inside the white cylinder). The cylinder helps disperse the flash, so we get even lighting and not too much reflection. 

The camera moves down from focussing at the top of the specimen to the bottom, taking pictures as it goes. Then the computer program stitches them all together, taking the parts in focus to make one big composite image. 

The finished image! 

I've been a bit quiet this week, sorry! I've been learning to identify different subfamilies of braconid wasps. When I started, they all looked the same and I thought I'd never ever be able to recognise the different types! But I'm getting there... and I thought I'd share a couple of the characters taxonomists use to tell what kind of wasp they've found. 

The pictures above is the face of a wasp that is in the group called the 'cyclostome wasps'. They all have this weird dent or hole in their faces, where the red arrow in the picture is pointing. 'Cyclostome' comes from the Greek 'round mouth' so the name makes sense! Below this concave section of their mouthparts is the mandibles. The microgastrine wasps, that I'm studying for my PhD, don't have this concave section - their face is much flatter. 

Another character I've learnt about is the wing venation. Insect wings have veins inside them, which are either tubular (tiny hollow tubes) that often have pigment in them (are coloured) or otherwise the veins are almost invisible seams in the wings. Some braconid wasps, like the picture on the left, have coloured, tubular veins that run all the way to the edge of the wing. The microgastrine wasps only have coloured tubular veins close to their body - on the outer edges the veins are almost invisible.

The pictures above were taken on the microscope automontage camera in our lab. It takes pictures at different depths of focus and then the computer program stitches all the different photos together. Mustard and I will show you how the process works next week!