Labwork

When working in a laboratory, there are a couple of things one has to look out for, and a few offers you will regret taking up. The first is when someone at a microscope turns around and says, "Hey, wanna see something gross?" The person at the microscope has been there all day, looking at nasty things all day. If they think it's gross, it's really gross. I know. I've been that person. (Last time was a giant beetle with a member half its own body length. Being a biologist has made me appreciate how very simple and comfortable human sex is. Don't believe me? Look up Tasmanian Devils. Or cats.)

The other is cleaning the freezer.

We had a pair of high school students in our lab last summer. They were in a research mentorship program that let them get lab experience and conduct their own projects.  But they had yet to quite sort out the projects, and so the graduate student mentoring them did what any intelligent graduate student would do: set them to working on something that needed to be done, but he really didn't want to do. Which was cleaning the freezer.

The freezer in question was shared by not one, but two laboratories. Directly opposite this freezer was the sole microscope with a functional light in either laboratory.  At that point, I was doing a project that involved identifying a few hundred samples of insects and me and my little glass jars and wafting fumes of insect-infused ethanol had a front seat to the ensuing drama.

It started out normally enough. There were a lot of samples of grasses and seedheads, and these passed without comment.

"Dude! This is full of bugs!"

I looked up. "Oh. Yeah, those are ours."

Silence for a bit longer. Then one of the guys, looking puzzled, walked past me with a styrofoam tray of test tubes, all of which were filled with what looked like frozen pond water and duck weed.

A bit later, "Why is there a dead lizard in here?"

"Uh," I said. "I think it may be one of ours again. We found it in one of the pitfall traps we set for these," with a gesture to the bottled bugs, "and I guess someone decided to keep it."

"Oh," they said, and went back to work. I was rather envious. The most exciting thing that had happened on my project that day was a bright blue, utterly unidentifiable wasp.

Some time later, a sudden stillness behind me made me look up. The students were standing there, looking at something with identical bewildered expressions. I slid down from my stool to go look as well.

There was a snake in the freezer.

Neither lab studied snakes. The lab down the hall did, but that professor was very careful of his specimens and he studied live animals, not dead ones. We hadn't had a snake fall into any of our pitfall traps. Certainly not a snake that big; this one was a milk snake, at least two feet long. In short, there was no reason whatsoever that there should be a snake in the laboratory freezer.

"Yeah, that's...not one of ours," I said after a few moments.

"Let's just make sure it doesn't thaw," said the shorter of the two, and closed the door.

It turned out that one of the professors had found that snake dead on his driveway, and not knowing what else to do with it, had brought it in and popped it into the shared freezer. He took it with him after he saw it, and I don't think I ever found out what he did with it.

A bit later, one of my friends got a position in another lab, this one studying urchins. On her first day, she got to help clean out the freezer. She didn't have anything as interesting; she spent the day digging through frozen urchin gut contents, which is as appetizing as it sounds. What made it exciting was that the freezer was a walk-in one, and she departed that bright, sunny morning in mittens and a scarf.