Gwyneth Tefft, Entry #1, Settling In

My first week here at Berkeley has been incredible. First of all, the campus is beautiful and I spend a lot of my free time just walking around and admiring the scenery. Another great thing is I am living directly on campus, and it takes me less than 3 minutes to walk to my lab every morning.

On my first day I met my grad student, Brian, who took me out to lunch at a local cafe. He explained the work we will be doing this summer and we talked about how cool ants are. It turns out that Brian has also lived in Aspen, Colorado, and so we bonded over that.

Over the next few days, I would meet my PI Dr. Tsutsui (everyone just calls him Neil), and Kelsey, who is another grad student. Oh, and Kelsey's dog Luna, who is possibly the cutest dog ever and just hangs out with us in the lab. The lab is filled with huge containers of different ant colonies and lots of complex instruments which I have yet to learn their purpose.  

The Tsutsui Lab

I was also introduced to many different techniques used to study ants. My favorite technique I was taught involves using a tube-like device called an aspirator, which is used to literally suck up ants for collection. I had a lot more fun than I probably should have had when Brian asked me to collect a colony of ants from a container and I spent 20 minutes sucking up ants. Another technique I was taught was collecting pheromones from a SPME needle. When ants are agitated they release a chemical alarm signal to warn colony members and these chemicals can be picked up from the air using this needle. We then use a GC-MS machine to determine the exact compounds present.

Collecting pheromones using an SPME fiber

So far, working in my lab has been really great. I'm excited to continue learning about ants and to start working on Brian's project with him!