Snail shots

I was setting up an experiment this morning when I remembered this post from the Collin lab in Panama, describing unusual lab and field equipment used in tropical fieldwork. (Read the post. It's entertaining.) Writing about my unusual uses of supplies seems like a good followup to a post about the myriad random items I carry around in my car for fieldwork.

I have made my share of runs to Target and Home Depot for supplies to use in the field: hardware cloth, epoxy, cable ties, bricks, etc. I also have used nail polish to mark snails in the lab, and I discovered that nail art pens are handy for writing individual numbers on snails (I put a dab of colored polish on the snail before writing identifying info with the pen).

My personal favorite weird item from the field is definitely the 600 or so ping-pong balls that I used in a series of field experiments. With the help of an undergraduate, I diligently sanded all of them so that small marine invertebrates would think they were a great place to live.

675 ping-pong balls in a cooler, sanded and dirtied and ready to go.

The reason I was thinking about this today, though, is that I was setting up a lab experiment with strange equipment. This is a little more unusual than throwing together a field experiment with dross from Home Depot. If I'm doing molecular work, I have to work with precise, sterile, and (usually) expensive supplies. Even most of my non-molecular work happens in lab glassware like this:

Photo from Wikipedia. I'm almost never playing with colorful solutions, though.

As anyone who has ever broken anything in chem lab knows, these things aren't terribly cheap. But sometimes I need several dozen small containers that fit under the microscope, can hold lots of larval snails, and can be easily and thoroughly cleaned. So today, my lab bench looks like this:

Those are shot glasses, in case you can't tell.

Shot glasses really are the perfect solution. They are small, cheap (less than $1 each), easy to clean, easy to sterilize, and the perfect size to go under the microscope. Best of all, the curvature at the bottom of the glass makes it easy to see everything under the scope -- there's no corners for the snails to hide in. 

Using shot glasses like this is not my original solution to this problem, but it's still infrequent enough that every time I give a talk someone makes a joke about it. 

Fingers crossed that the experiment works today.