By Gabrielle Mendelsohn
A
week after arriving at La Selva Biological Station in the Heredia Province of
Costa Rica, it was time to start developing our final, independent research
projects. After some discussion, my research partner, Gil, and I decided we wanted
to focus on questions with pollination. After doing a brief review of the
literature, we came up with some preliminary ideas looking to see if the plant
community structure surrounding flowering plants impacted pollinator visitation.
We brought the idea to our professor, Mauricio, confident he would approve the
idea. But after having Mau poke holes in our first few ideas, we quickly
learned that this project would be a little bit tricky.
When
our first few ideas did not pan out, Mau helped us find a new direction. We
settled on investigating the flower preferences in mites by doing choice
experiments. We collected old flowers in the afternoon. In the morning we placed
half of them in a bag with a cotton ball soaked in acetone for 30 minutes to
kill the mites. We also went around in the afternoon to our plants and placed mesh
bags over inflorescences that had a few flowers that looked like they would
open the following morning. The purpose of this was to prevent hummingbirds
from visiting the flowers, as the literature had suggested mites required
hummingbirds to travel between inflorescences.
In
the morning, we collected our new flowers and killed the mites on the old
flowers. We then set up our experiment, expecting that there would be no mites
in all flower treatments, allowing us to control the number of mites in each
trial so we could count them and determine which flower they chose. One old
flower, one new flower, one new flower cut in half, and a water droplet as a
control were placed 90 degrees apart in a petri dish. Ten mites were added to
each of our 10 identical petri dishes and left for 30 minutes. When counting
all the flowers, we quickly realized mites had not, in fact, been excluded. We
adjusted our methods again and again: placing the new flower in acetone as well,
leaving flowers in acetone for longer, trying a deodorizer to kill the mites.
Our first three days of data collection continued in this manner. Each time we
made a change we were hopeful, and each time we became increasingly convinced
that mites do not die.
In the end, we altered our
experiment to not involve mite exclusion. We were able to come up with a
project that answered our initial question of flower preference in mites,
albeit slightly altered, which yielded interesting and statistically
significant data. The past two weeks have showed me how important it is to be
flexible with research, to be willing to roll with the punches, and plan extra
time to be extra thorough, because things will certainly go differently than
you expect. Above all, I learned that mites will probably outlive us all.
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