The Hallowed Halls of Hatfield...

I thought today that some of you, for whatever reason, won't be able to come visit me while I'm down here in Newport (I'm looking at you, Mr. Ellis!). That's a bit of a shame since if you were able to come, you'd get a full (nearly) behind the scenes tour of Hatfield Marine Science Center. So instead I thought it would be a good idea for me to give a virtual tour of sorts so that you all can see what life here is like.

Part 1: The Education Wing

Most of my time is spent in this one hallway, tucked back in the same building where the Visitor's Center is housed, and leading off onto the library. The Ed-wing (as it's lovingly referred to) is used for community education as well as university education. It's not uncommon for my class to be sitting through a lecture on the physiology of fish reproduction while a group of fifth graders goes walking by, wondering what we're talking about when we mention estradiol and vitellogenisis. On the left side of the picture is a set of classrooms, here's a picture of me getting my study on as I work through complicated hormonal patterns and pathways. I like to study using the big whiteboards in our classroom because it lets me write things out and draw arrows and make notes to myself in a format where I can step back from it and look at the 'big picture'. So many teachers tell you to look at the big picture but it's hard to do, except when you have a giant white board!

Another feature of the Ed-wing is the series of wet labs that run down the hallway. A typical wet lab houses a series of tanks which are connected to the water system at the center which pulls water from the ocean to circulate in the tanks all around the center. Once the water has run through the system it gets filtered and pumped back out into the bay cleaner than it was when it came in. In our wetlab we have a series of tanks that are used by students (including me) to house portions of their research projects, I personally have a couple of purple sea urchins which I need to return to Boiler Bay because they were spared the horror of dissection. There's a also a second set of tanks towards the windows which house our specimens for class, currently they're being occupied by some fish and also some nudibranchs from our invertebrate section. Those poor little nudies need to go back to their homes!

Well, that's all for this part of the tour. Next time, the apartments!