S-STEM/TRAIN Scholar Christopher Livingston's Blog

The semester is coming to a close very soon and although it felt like it's taken forever it also feels like it went very fast. This is my last semester at Phoenix College (although I'll be back for another chemistry class at some point). Being a student again has been an amazing experience for me, every aspect of my life has changed since I decided to come back to school and sometimes I'm not sure who I am anymore... but there is nothing I regret and I'm coming to like the new me the more I get to know him. It takes courage to make life changing decisions, and it takes courage to see your commitments through and nobody tells you how scary and difficult the process of destroying yourself to build a better you is. I'm sure nobody expected this semester to turn out as it has, I think about how we've had to adapt to make things work and that the tools that we've utilized to adapt have been because of advancements we've made in the past decade. There is no wa...

Happy April 23rd fellow research students! This week I was able to get a hold of my insect samples that were collected from the Phoenix College garden earlier in the semester. They are currently 'chilling' in my freezer, waiting for me to further separate and classify them for the research project. Having these samples will help me to do much more work on my paper than I would have been able to do without them, so thank you Matt for coordinating a safe hand-off of the samples to me. As we continue our isolation indoors I hope that everyone is doing well and has plenty of nutritious food and stimulating activities. Please take care of yourselves, I will see you all on the other side of this pandemic!

Hopefully everyone is doing well out there. This week things seemed to start moving along with my classes. I have been getting in touch with some contacts from my physics and chemistry classes so we can struggle through this ordeal together and it seems to be paying off. After speaking with Matt I have a good idea of how my research project is going to proceed, so that is a relief. My paper will probably only have a partial conclusion but I think that should be just fine given the situation. It seems our beautiful extended spring may be getting ready to depart us, so if you have any big projects to get done in your yard this weekend might be your last good shot at it. Take care guys. More flowers from my yard:                  

So, we've been away from school for some weeks now and trying to get back into the swing is going to be difficult. A couple of my classes are going fine online and I don't see any problem with completing them in the future. The rest of my classes are not going as smoothly though, either it's a problem with transitioning to online format for the instructor... or because the instructor communicates very little to the students (which was also the case while we were still coming to class). I really don't know if I'll be able to pass some of those classes online. I at least felt like I had some sort of control over my grade when I was able to physically attend class... now, not so much. Hopefully things work out. Attached is a picture of this blog being written on my laptop.

This week I began sifting through my pitfall traps. Removing large debris from the collection yielded about a tablespoon of small material to sift through. Using a microscope and some tweezers I was able to locate an incredible amount of insects, at least 30 insects from each collection (there have been two collections done so far). My task was to separate the insects according to the orders that they belong to using a dichotomous key. So far I have been able to identify orders such as Coleoptera, Hymenoptera, Araneae, Diptera... etc. These insects are very, very small so the biggest challenge I faced this week was overcoming the force of static electricity under the microscope while looking at the insects, the wrong movement could cause the insect to slingshot across the petri-dish a few inches, but at that magnification it may as well have been propelled a mile away. I found a large amount of Diptera larvae which Dr. Ortiz identified as soldier fly larvae (picture attached). This has...

Technically spring doesn't officially start until March 19th this year, but since we are in AZ and everything is blooming and trees are leafing out so I think it is safe to call it spring. Since my future will revolve around plants, spring has become a favorite season of mine. I enjoy watching the transformation that the landscape undergoes and seeing the new blossoms tempting the bees out for full days of work. In my own yard I am observing the trees turning green, the clover is growing tall, and to my excitement the daffodils that I planted last year have sprung up and already have a bloom. I have attached a picture of the daffodil and also some other blooms in my yard: Freesia, Snapdragons, Azaleas, and an ornamental Kale that has bolted but not yet bloomed. This week has been jam packed with things going on which makes sense since we are roughly half-way through the semester. This weekend I will be participating in the Arizona WET Project where community volunteers, usually mas...

Wow! What a busy week this has been for me! This week I worked on my ASU transfer application and my TRAIN application for the fall along with everything else that I normally do. I started the week off on Sunday by meeting up with Dr. Ortiz and Dr. Jennifer Sweat on campus to capture and mount bees. This experience was very interesting because I was able to see the method used for the entire process. Plastic bowls were placed in the garden and around the future site of the native pollinator garden, the bowls had been spray painted with fluorescent spray paint to attract insects and then filled with soap water to kill the bees. Most of the insects that we caught were flies but we had a few sweat bees and also a lady bug (the lady bug survived and we released it, in case you were worried). Dr. Sweat had brought some honey bees with her that she had previously caught in case we didn’t catch any, these were the bees that we looked at under the dissecting microscope and then mounted (phot...