Jason Kiene and Dr. Jerry Johnson, Integrative Biology

My research experience has been quite different than anything I foresaw or expected. I will start this report by first reminding you what the experiment was supposed to be, then discuss the setbacks I had during the last two years to try to do the experiment and finally what has happened most recently that led to the failure of the experiment.

To briefly recap the experiment, my experiment is one that investigates life-history traits. Most papers about factors influencing the evolution of life-history traits have approached the subject by testing the effects of one of two environmental characteristics, temperature and food. My project, however, addressed the issue of predator presence or absence, in the evolution of reproductive effort (frequency, quantity and quality of offspring). Basically, I was looking to see if the predators induce a plastic trait causing females exposed to them to have smaller babies and more of them, while simultaneously growing to smaller overall sizes because their resources are put into their offspring rather than their own bodies.

As reported earlier, my schedule was thrown off by the much drawn-out IACUC approval process. People did not respond to my requests, phone calls, or emails. For example, the veterinarian did not respond back to me for about a month and a half, and when I heard back from her, there some things she wanted explained better. I submitted it back only to have her reject it again, this time with four times as many things to correct. After another submission and rejection, I finally got her approval so that I could submit to the IACUC committee. With the IACUC Committee, I had similar frustrations. I submitted early in summer and did not hear back for a long time. In the meantime, I had already finished my tank setups and had bred a number of generations, but the tanks were never used. When I heard back from the committee, they had some things I needed to revise again. I turned in the revisions only to hear back that everything was good except the statistics portion of the report.

Later I had troubles with the statistician that were similar in nature.

Another factor that contributed to the length of time it took me to finally receive approval, was our lab. I wanted to start the actual experimentation in the summer. However, in June, our temporary wet lab was moved as the new facility was started. The fish, unfortunately, were stuck in terrible circumstances. The lighting in the room they were moved to was on 24 hours at times, the room was super cold, causing the water to be colder than normal and the lighting during normal hours was nowhere close to normal. Fortunately, my fish did not die, but there were many others in the room that did. The adverse affect we saw was that the fish would not give birth to new offspring because they needed the energy for their own heat. The lack of sleep also led to few, if any, births. This factor would prove later to be detrimental to my project.
Completion of this lab was supposed to occur over the December 2006 Christmas break, yet it did not really happen until February 2007. This means that I could not have even started the experiment before February, for my setup, once begun, must sit for months without disturbance in order to ensure accurate results. Thus, I am simply been waiting for the space in the new lab to get started with my actual experiment.

When we finally received word the lab was done, I helped move all the things over. Regrettably, the day after we moved into the new lab in February 2007, one of my Grande females died. I suspect that it was due to the poor conditions she had lived in for the interim period. This was a blow from which I could not recover because all the females of the same species that were F3 generation fish died in the cold interim lab. I had no replacement that I could use, and because we moved so late into the lab, I also did not enough time to breed and raise another female. Thus, no experimentation was ever done on my part.

In conclusion, I must add that I am a little disappointed with my mentor. He intended good things and was helpful at first, but I felt that he became so detached from the project and expected me to be so independent that I found at certain critical moments, he was always unavailable. Most of the reason for this was because he was working hard getting grant money for his researchers and working on the new lab. There were a couple of times, though, that we set up appointments to talk and figure out how to salvage the project, and he never showed up. He never contacted me either. I had the feeling like he really did not care what happened. Eventually, after I realized that there was no way I could finish, let alone start, I just stopped going to the lab because I felt it a waste of time. I have already cleaned fish tanks for two years. That was not the point of the project, and we have someone there who does it for the lab anyway. Needless to say, I am very disappointed with how things turned out; my fire and enthusiasm was slowly killed by the lack of support. However, I would add that I feel this is not because my mentor was “bad”, but because he was preoccupied with all of the other major events in the lab that were bigger than me and my project. I think students following me will have greater support. I was just the unlucky one who was there during a transition period.

Personally, it has been enjoyable working so closely to living organisms. However, after a few years of simply changing water and feeding fish with little other work to do, it has become quite monotonous and a waste of time. I have also learned that getting approval, publishing papers and carrying out the project are no simple task. There is a ton of red tape. Something else, though, that I have learned about myself through my work on this project is how I would like to do more research with people. I spend hours in the lab by myself taking care of fish, and at times it gets quite lonely. In the future, I hope to have colleagues to work with. I think I will enjoy the setting more. Working with people will definitely be something that I do at medical school, since we are required to research.

The project is a good project, but it just seems that everything was working against me to get the actual experiment done. It was beneficial, however, in helping me with my medical school interviews. All the schools asked me about it, and I was able to share my experience with them; most were also fascinated by the idea for the project and felt it to be very interesting. I believe this was beneficial in enhancing my application and helping me get into a very competitive school. For this I am extremely grateful.