Totally worth it

Sometimes when I start off doing something asking myself, "What have I got myself in to?" it winds up having been worth the effort.

That was true today with the soil-critters lab. Even though I was all pessimistic ("It's been dry and it's been cold") about what they might find, they found all kinds of stuff.

One group even found a pseudoscorpion, which is (in my opinion) about the most unusual organism you could find in a soil of this nature (this is from under the leafpile in my backyard. Granted, I don't use herbicides or pesticides, but still - it's practically downtown in an area that's been built up for at least 60 years (and was farmed, apparently, before that).

And one person got excited when she realized she could correctly identify members of order Coleoptera (the beetles) from body shape and other morphological features. And another saw a small earthworm under magnification and strong light for the first time, and realized you can see the intestinal tract of said worm. ("Its insides! They're MOVING.")

This is one of the favorite labs; even lab-averse people (some of the pre-meds, for example, don't seem to relish the field labs much) enjoy it. And well they should; it's fun looking at bugs through a microscope.

It's also kind of fun for me - for one thing, other than digging up the soil, prep is minimal. And the math is minimal as well, so I'm not fielding lots of worried questions from the math-averse people. And I get to show off a bit: from having worked with the invertebrates as much as I have, I know most of them (at least to order) and so I can walk over and say "Oh, yeah, that's a mite, order Acarina" or "What you have there is a rove beetle" and it kind of fascinates them that I know this stuff.