Mai Berlese funnels: let me show U them:



That's what I spent my morning (well, before class, between classes, and after class) doing - making a home-brew set of Berlese funnel like objects for my soil invertebrate study. (There is another set on the bench opposite these).

They're pretty simple, but they fill the needed role.



They are those heavy foil casserole pans (something like a buck for 2), plus "liners" (you can just barely see it in the above photo) cut from plastic needlepoint canvas. (Craft supplies to the rescue again).

The idea on these is that the lamps (which we had already; they are used for photosynthesis-of-elodea experiments in GenBio) heat and light the soil. Soil "critters," having a natural dislike of heat and dryness, burrow down, fall through the grid (on a typical Berlese funnel it is a little wire grid, like window screen) and wind up in the preservative (actually ethanol in this case; most preservatives give me bad reactions but ethanol fumes don't bother me too much) that's in the beaker (which we also had on hand).

Total cost (not including the stuff already on hand): about $10.

On the one hand, this makes me really happy; I feel a bit like the spiritual descendant of both Angus MacGuyver and of those early-times scientist folk who "bash up" what they need for the lab (I remember in a book I read about the early development of penicillin, Dr. Heatley, one of the researchers, talked about how he "bashed up" some equipment they needed using wood from bookcases discarded from the Bodleian Library).

And it's also kind of nice to be able to do the research I want to to and that I care about - I could probably get thousands of dollars in funding to look at some weird soil fungus that might have antibiotic properties, but I'm really more interested in the little "critters" in the soil. But because they don't cure disease, can't be a new source of energy, or (presumably) are not greatly affected by rising CO2 levels, funding for them is harder to come by.

I've been involved with writing a couple grants for NSF. Never been on one that actually got awarded. That's because the overall success rate is something like 14% - and that includes the big Research I schools with lots of research equipment already. I've tried talking to folks about getting funding for, say, a growth chamber, and the response is kind of, "Wait? You don't have one yet?" and the light kind of goes out of their eyes and sometimes you feel like the response is "Why are you even bothering to try to do research, if you don't have such basic things?"

And the other thing with grantwriting at small schools - if you get one, YOU are the grants administrator. YOU get to do all the paper work. And it is (frankly) not worth it to me. Not even with the fact that I'd be able to hire a student, give them that extra experience, and get some of my work done for me. I'd rather spend umpteen hours between classes or after class sorting my own critters rather than spend that time filling out the equivalent of tax forms so I can hire a student to do it.

So I don't know. Again, I've gotten the response of some at bigger schools with more money that "If you can't get funding for it, it's probably not worth doing" and that kind of angers me.

I like being able to build my own stuff. It made me happy when, upon not finding funnels of the right size (or ENOUGH - that's my biggest gripe with having to get stuff from local stores; they may have two or three of something in stock when you need eight), I found the metal pans. And then thought of the plastic canvas (because I didn't want to work with cutting hardware cloth; that's too hard on the hands and too easily bent). And in a way I feel a bit like I'm in the same lineage as Darwin & company; they built most of their own stuff, because there were no governmental agencies to fund them, and moreover, there were few scientific-equipment houses to sell them a glorified funnel for $30 a pop.

On the other hand, I fear that when this eventually goes to press, some reviewer will gripe about "nonstandard methodology" or "substandard equipment" and try to sink my paper because of that. (There's a lot of undiscussed snobbery in science; some people believe if you're not at a Research I school you should not be permitted to do research; others believe that if you don't write for the "big" journals you're just a hack and should give it up, and on, and on. It irritates me because from my readings about earlier days, especially in ecology, none of that was there. And it seems to have come in - in ecology at least - because of what I call "physics envy" - the need to have the fancy flashy beepy tools that generate perfect numbers every time. The idea that the messiness and unpredictability of fieldwork makes it somehow less desirable to lab simulations or numbers crunched on a mainframe. And I LIKE the messy part of things. I LIKE the chance that I will find something sort of unexpected. I prefer being sort of a Jamie Hyneman of ecology, where I can go to my cabinets of stuff I've saved up and use my ingenuity to build what I need.)