Slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

So I had a fun day in lab.

And by fun, I mean horrifying. And kinda hilarious.

My advisor took off recently to do important professorial things, and so through a series of events, I wound up being the only person in lab today, which made me feel very important indeed. It's the first time I've been put in charge of a whole entire laboratory, even for a day.

We've got two cultures that I'm growing that are rather sensitive; the algae and the baby urchins. The baby urchins need constant temperature, filtered seawater and algae, all of which need to be kept free from contamination. The algal cultures are just as sensitive.

So I come in this morning (after a simply hellish time parking my bike) and open up the lab where three of the algal cultures are and it's sweltering--about 75+ degrees. This may not seem so hot to most people but the lab typically runs about 10 degrees cooler. To my relief, the algal cultures are doing fine, but the bubbler (that aerates them so the pH doesn't go screwy) has managed to unplug itself during the weekend.

I fix this. Then I go into the other room, dump out the acid rinse from the culture plates (note, culture plates are impossible to pour neatly), and then make my way to the tank room. At this rate, I'm expecting that something else has gone terribly wrong--a seawater hose has disconnected and the room is flooding, there has been a mass urchin escape and they're all in the drainpipe, a tank has exploded and both of the above have happened, the bucket with the larval culture has fallen over, the air hose into the larval culture had disintegrated, the temperature has gone flooey and all the inhabitants are dead....

You can imagine my relief when I open the door and everything is normal; the temperature is what it should be, the bucket is upright, there are no visible escapees and no floods of water. I breathe a sigh of  relief and saunter over to check the larval culture.

And there is a starfish.

In the larval culture.

A fat, filthy, actively excreting starfish. In my larval culture. My nice, clean larval culture, with the seawater that needs to be filtered through a 20 micron filter and the air that needs to go through other filters and the algae that need to be grown so they're pure cultures.

I stared at it in mute fury for a few minutes. The starfish crapped more.

Then I started laughing. It was that or break something and all the breakable things were expensive.

In the end I fished out the starfish and filtered the culture (which seems to be dead as a result) and spawned urchins (the female kept flipping over and the male exuded simply VAST quantities of sperm, and filtered water and went home with the sincere hope that the experience wouldn't be repeated on the morrow.

And then I played video games.