Daphnia!
Last Friday, PVCC Prof. Joanna Vondrasek brought three UVA students to The Quarry Gardens at Schuyler to sample water in the quarry pools, wetlands, and the adjoining pond as part of a survey of local populations of Daphnia.
Daphnia are miniscule crustaceans commonly called water fleas (because of their swimming style) that live is various freshwater environments. The sampling protocol is to throw a drag net with an attached collecting tube, and then package and label promising samples for later investigation under a microscope. The featured photo shows Vondracek (left) with undergraduates Owen Shaffer and Lauren Bradshaw (right), and Ph.D. candidate Robert Porter (center) evaluating a catch.
Joanna is using her semester-long sabbatical to work in a UVA biology lab, a goal being to establish a laboratory culture of Daphnia in aquaria at PVCC that students there may use for independent studies. You may learn more about the UVA biology lab using Daphnia for genomics investigations here: https://www.bergland-lab.org/
A goal of the Quarry Gardens is to support research in the natural sciences by educators and citizen scientists by making our land and facilities available for such studies.
