It’s going to be a good season, I can tell already. It’s finals week, so I’ll still have an abrupt pile of grading to do on Thursday, but otherwise, my teaching obligations are done for the semester. Now I’m trapped, trapped I tell you, in Morris for almost (I do have two quick trips to Europe planned) the entire summer with a collection of administrative responsibilities, but the good part of that is that I have ambitious plans for what I’ll be doing in the lab. I’m also going to be living the good life.

So this morning I slept in to 7:00. I know, it’s slothful of me, but I have the freedom to indulge myself a little bit now and then. After I got up, I took a nice brisk walk downtown, did some shopping, stocked up on some fresh vegetables, and once I got home, chopped them up and set them to soak in a tasty marinade. I’ll roast them up for dinner tonight.

Then I started reading up an accumulated mass of papers that’ll give me some implementation ideas for the work I have planned.

I’ll have a student working with me, and we’ve got a couple of projects in the works.

1. There’s some boring scut work to be done: lab cleanup, clearing out old reagents from the refrigerator, making up new stock solutions. Don’t be disillusioned, but part of the research life is janitorial…so much dishwashing.

2. My grand plan requires an expansion of my fish colony to include multiple genetic strains, so we’re going to be scrubbing tanks, sterilizing surfaces, setting up new tanks with boring feeder fish to get the nitrogen cycle going and condition the water, getting the brine shrimp hatchery (live fish food!) thriving, all that sort of stuff that qualifies you to be a clerk in a pet store.

3. Once all the tanks are bubbling away happily, we’re getting some new strains from the zebrafish stock center. Then it’s a few months of nursing them along, collecting eggs, propagating new generations and raising them to adulthood to get the whole colony self-sustaining, and to prepare for crosses to produce hybrid strains. After all this, my student will be well-trained to be a hobbyist aquarist.

4. Concurrently, we’ll be doing some real science on the embryos we get, analyzing their behavior quantitatively to identify consistent differences between strains, and also in response to different environmental stresses. This is going to require a bit of computer work and — oh, no! — basic math to develop image analysis protocols. That’s what I’ve been reading about; I’ve done some of this in the past on an obsolete software system, so I’m going to have to piece together some custom bits to make it all work. I’ve been reading about Fourier analysis and power spectra all morning, and I’m kinda jazzed. Math! Computers! Embryos! Science!

5. The dream is that once we’ve found some subtle differences between different strains, we can start doing crosses to dissect out and isolate the genetic components, if any, of the behavior. That’s going to take a couple of generations of crosses, which means that if I’m lucky we’ll get those results next year, or at worst, the year after. Behavioral Genetics! Yay! Long generation times! Boo!

It’s step #4 that’ll give us some quick quantitative results, I hope, and maybe something presentable at a meeting or even publishable. It’s all going to be preliminary and descriptive, but that’s what you need to do to establish a foundation for experiments.

Unfortunately for you, I won’t be blogging about any of the details of the work this summer — I’ve been scooped before when I foolishly posted protocols on the web, and especially when you have a very small lab with limited humanpower to throw at a problem, that costs. But I might just occasionally say a few general things about the kinds of analyses we’re doing.

Or I could talk about the moldy stuff we throw out of the refrigerator. That’s probably safe.