Culturing culture

I am supervising/mentoring/collaborating with two post-doctoral researchers (a.k.a. postdocs), and greatly enjoying the process. They are both smart, hardworking and enthusiastic, and, unlike me, talented experimentalists. I am good at proposing experimental designs, and at inventing or improving upon experimental apparatus, but I managed to get through all my years of training as a biologist without ever being taught the nitty-gritty of laboratory work. I like to make things up as I go along, and work on twelve projects at a time, paying sporadic attention to each, and you can't really do experiments that way. But these two post-docs actually know what they are doing in the lab. It is impressive to see how thoroughly they train the students, how carefully they document their doings, and how well they know their organisms. As a grad student I started working with rotifers with almost no prior knowledge of rotifers, and without any advisor who knew rotifers. I read the literature, but there is a deep cultural knowledge about how to care for aquatic lab animals, with lore and practice around each group, and I had none of that. These two know, and it is wonderful to watch and learn.

Suddenly crustaceans

I don't have a taxonomic specialization, and I'm happy with that. I've worked with or dug deeply in to the literature on hardwood forest trees, midges, several groups of birds, frogs, rotifers, primates and Hydra (the polyp, not the mythical beast). I've probably read more of the literature on beetles in the family Melyridae than any other non-entomologist who knows almost nothing about beetles.

I've now gotten to the point in my career where I am organizing a research group and serving on people's committees, and suddenly and unintentionally, I'm all into crustaceans. I'm supervising a post-doc and a doctoral student and on the committee of another student all working on different Daphnia projects. Daphnia are the model organism for crustaceans. I've got another post-doc working on barnacles (which despite their outward appearance as adults, are very much crustaceans, and go through not one but two amazing metamorphoses before ending up attached to ships, rocks or whales). This particular barnacle, Balanus improvisus was first described by Darwin (1854) in his giant book on barnacles that he wrote to procrastinate publishing On the Origin of Species (1859).

I've still got projects on Neurospora a fungus best known for ruining your bread, on Hydra, and on primates (including humans) going, but most of my time at the moment is crustacean focused. I suppose I will have to learn the basics of carcinology. Yes, that does come from the same root as carcinogen and carcinoma.