*laugh*

Well, judging from my last post, my friends are kind of confused about my occupation in life. I guess I should of put this up earlier, just for clarification, but I was having so much fun messing with all of you.... ~_^

I work as a senior lab tech at an evolutionary developmental biology lab at the University of Maryland, College Park. Basically we're working on how things evolve when environmental factors influence the development of a species over a long period of time. To do this, we keep two forms of the fish species Astyanax mexicanus in our lab. The "surface" sub-set comes from rivers, and have pigmented skin and eyes. The "cave" sub-set comes from, well, caves in the mountains, and they are albino with no eyes. These two sub-species are exactly the same genetically and even start out developing the same, but at about 36 hours various switches get thrown in the cavefish that change the expression patterns of various genes, which results in the different phenotype. Its kind of like why there are white humans and black humans...our genes are exactly the same, but because of a difference in gene expression as we develop, we end up with different phenotypes. We want to know how those changes first started and how they became permanent enough that our fish can pass them on to their offspring.

Since most of this stuff happens during early development, our research requires a lot of fish embryos and young fry to study and compare. We breed our adult fish here at the lab so we can have the samples we require at the right timepoints in development. The cycle takes about one week to go thru, and during that time, we're just crazy-busy because the adult fish need more care than normal and we have to collect the embryos they lay. We generally breed the fish every other week...hence the term "breeding week". And let me tell you, those weeks are a LOT of work!

I do a lot more stuff than just running that, but that's the basic idea. ^_^