Thrid Internship Experience!

On Monday Dec. 30th, I visited the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences to go to my internship. When I was at my internship, I cleaned the fish tank that had been infested with flatworms and other junk plants. This was a pretty hard task because we had to scrub all of the rocks with toothbrushes to make sure that all the flatworms and other junk was gone. We set up a little station with two buckets and a few paper towels. One of the buckets contain a toxic chemical meant to kill all of the flatworms. The other bucket with a rinse bucket that contained just normal tapwater. I pulled one rock out of the tank and dumped it in the bucket with the toxic chemicals and began scrubbing it with a toothbrush. To clean just this one rock took me about 20 minutes, since it had so many holes and I had to get all of the junk out of those holes. After scrubbing all the junk off, I rinsed it in that bucket with tapwater and put it back in the tank. I moved onto another rock in the tank. This happened to be the biggest rock in the tank, and I could barely fit it in the toxic chemical bucket. This rock took me about 35 minutes to clean because it was so big. After I cleaned it off I rinsed with water and put it back in the tank. As I was cleaning the rocks in the tank, Christine Batten, my mentor, was siphoning some of the flatworms out of the tank. After cleaning off these two rocks, we quickly scrubbed some junk off of the three rocks that we had cleaned the previous week. We then put all the materials away. After doing all this it was, unfortunately, time for me to leave.  I am very excited to go back to my internship because I feel that it will continue to teach me new things about marine life and how to take care of saltwater tanks.