Collecting Answers One Sample at a Time

My research seems to be progressing very well.  As always, every Tuesday we go to Canton Vasquez de Coronado to collect our water samples from the river.

However, this time a professional videographer from the UCR (Universidad de Costa Rica) went with us to record our field work to make a documentary of all the ongoing research at the university. This week’s main topic of interest was to test my mentor’s theory that there could be illegal human fecal discharges going on along the river based on my first and second week results.

Last week, I had some shocking results that I was not expecting. Last week I was expecting to see continuous humans’ discharges but it turned out to be animal discharges. For that reason, this week I was hoping to see human discharges, but I won’t be able to know my results until Tuesday of next week.

On Monday, I was given a quick introduction by my other mentor Erick Morales, whose background is mainly in environmental epidemiology geographic information systems called QGIS. The point of this program is to create data based on patterns found or spatial characteristics and create connections with the data collected from the lab to create correlations between each other.

Every week Erick and I will be going back to the river to explore the area and use a GPS to mark specific locations where we may find possible illegal human discharges or any other reason that could explain our positive results for human contamination in the river found in the first week.  I am excited and filled with curiosity of this week’s results.

            I was also able to help my MHIRT coworkers on their project since I’ve been finishing so quickly with mine. I learned to filtrate water using a metal manifold for Jessica’s project in coliphages and to do antibiotic testing on bacteria for Paulette’s research on multi-resistant bacteria found on the same river where we all are collecting our samples.