Day 1 (late)

Today marks the first official day of my internship at the Museum of Natural Sciences (again).  Let me give you a brief cast of characters of who I'm working with:

Me!

The Doc (Sort of working with me, it is complicated and it's not my place to go into it on this blog.  So good to a lowly undergrad like me.)

Dr. Student or DS for short (The Doc's grad student who actually isn't on my project.  Pretty cool guy though, super smart and nice.)

So for reasons I'm not getting into, my summer at the museum is going to be a lot of independent work for The Doc, and a few scheduled events. I will be attending Evolution 2014, sitting on The Doc's meeting with some Germans, possibly be doing some bee fly ID at  NCSU, attending a class for the museum interns, probably giving a talk at the end of the summer, doing some research/writing for The Doc's website, and Peru!  I'm probably forgetting a couple things, but you know I'll be writing about them.  Onto my first day!

I got to the museum early (despite grabbing breakfast with my dad and showing him the fish tank), and even though The Doc said to wait in her office if I arrived early, I was kind of afraid to go into the lab, because I wasn't sure if I would be remembered or not.  It didn't matter because no one noticed me walk in and The Doc re-introduced me.  My morning started with a nice chat with The Doc about what I'm doing this summer, what her goals for me are, what she's been up to, etc.  We ran to her car to get the Malagasy bombyliids.

The one bag of dried specimens I tried to ID were terrible.  A lot of headless bodies, a lot of heads, missing legs, missing abdomens, missing claws, wings I couldn't manipulate.  It was not a good day for ID-ing, and I have a feeling most of the others will be just as poor.  That's why I switched to specimens in alcohol.  Much easier to manipulate and in much better shape.  My eagerness to start identifying overtook the fact I had to make labels.  Label making is so tedious, because you can't waste the special paper, and therefore end up making labels for everything (which is inevitable).

Once labels were made, I began to go through the vials to start, identify (more like educated guessing, because the literature on Malagasy is old, difficult to find [and by this I mean does not exist on the internet], or written in another language when it can be found. Last summer I tried my darnedest to find any species of bee fly native to Madagascar, so I kind of have a vague idea of what I can see and what would be "normal" for the region.  Then again, it is Madagascar and there are so many undiscovered and poorly documented organisms there.  And that, pretty much was my first day back.