Since 2002, my university has only closed on account of severe winter weather on four occasions. Today was one of those occasions! This is a good thing because I hadn’t read the paper that we were going to discuss in lab meeting today, but this is also a bad thing because I haven’t met with my advisor in about a week, and I can’t make any progress on my research manuscripts until I discuss my results with him. I was supposed to hop on the manuscript bandwagon immediately after the conference at the beginning of the month, but I really have next to nothing to show for myself for the month of January. I presented at two conferences, but I’ve made basically zero progress on the data.

In my defense, there’s a lot that has gotten in the way. I was diagnosed with a severe anxiety reaction around Christmas, and I’ve been dealing with elevated levels of anxiety ever since then. This has resulted in a lot of days where I’m too anxious to leave the house. I’m working with my doctor on this, and I have some medications I’m trying out, but I really just need to be patient with myself for a while. If I push myself too hard, I have a panic attack and wind up having to start all over again with the recovery. I also had to get a part time job since my father has severely cut back my financial support (since I’m technically no longer a student until I start grad school officially in the fall). I can’t fault him for that in theory, but it has made me pretty grumpy and depressed, especially since my anxiety really limits the number of hours I can work. The two of these things combined are eating up about 90% of my time.

I have a meeting with my advisor tomorrow morning. I suppose I should get started churning some numbers so I can get to sleep at a semi-reasonable hour and not show up empty-handed.

I study muscles. Different types of muscle have differing functions, but I study the muscles used for locomotion, the skeletal muscles. There’s white muscle and red muscle, and an organism’s relative abundance of each type of muscle affects its maximum speed and endurance. If a bird has a lot of white muscle, it can fly more quickly (we’re assuming birds don’t coast, so think hummingbird). If it has a lot of red muscle, it can fly longer distances.

My study species involves two subspecies that live in different environments. Subspecies A lives in an open prarie. It nests in bushes and has to forage far and wide for food, without much competition. Subspecies B lives in dense forests, nests in trees, and doesn’t have to travel as far to forage but has more competition for food. Subspecies A has more red muscle, since it has to cover greater distances. Subspecies B has more white muscle, because it has to be quicker than its competitiors.

That much we already know. What we don’t know is what kind of muscle juvenile birds have. Since they’re confined to the nest, they’re not under any pressure to favor the development of one type over another. Is their muscle development locked in genetically, or is it a plastic trait? Does it change as they get older? If you take a bird from the prarie and put it in a forest, is it able to develop more white muscle? What about vice versa? Those are the questions my research tries to answer.

Once I’ve isolated the muscles from the surrounding connective tissue, I differentiate between types of muscle with two methods. First I use light spectrography (or -ography for short) to determine if the muscle reflects light at a wavelength more similar to red or white muscle, then I use mitochondriometry (or -ometry) to double-check my classification, since red muscle fibers have more mitochondria than white muscle fibers. After that I group my data by environment and compare relative muscle measurements to speed and endurance and see if there are any trends.