Eighth internship blog

On Thursday, the 20, I visited the HMNS for my internship. I got the keys from the front desk and went down the hall to the animal alcove. I got the cart with all of the materials on it from the animal alcove and went upstairs to the fish tank. I pulled out one rock andbegan cleaning it.this rock took me about 30 minutes to clean because there was so much stuff on it. Once I was done cleaning this rock, I put it back in the tank and pulled out a new rock. This rock had even more stuff on it, so I had to spend about 40 minutes getting all of the stuff off of it. Once this rock was done, I got a small rock from the tank. I cleaned this Rockford about 10 minutes because there was not that much stuff on it. I then took out three rocks thati had cleaned the previous week and recleaned them. Each one of these rock took me about 10 minutes to clean, since not much grows back on the rocks in a week. I then put all of the rocks back in the tank and went down to the animal alcove to put my cart away. 

This Is what the tank looks like now.

This is what the tank used to look like.

Seventh Internship Experience.

Last Thursday, I visited the HMNS for my internship. Christine, my mentor, was not available to help me so I had to clean the tank by myself. This was fun because it gave me a chance to really test out how much I knew about the tank. I started cleaning two rocks that I had previously cleaned, just to make sure nothing else was in them. After I cleaned these two rocks, it started on a small rock that I had never cleaned before. This rock was covered with plant junk, which took me a really long time to get off. I moved on to another rock, which was slightly bigger. This rock didn't have a ton of plant junk on it, but it did have a bristle worms. I had to pick each bristle worm out of each crevice. By the end, I had picked about 5 bristle worms out of this rock. I move onto my last rock. This rock had a lot of long plant junk on it. This plant junk was easier to get off since it was long, so I could just pull it off with my hands. It was then time for me to go, so I quickly cleaned up and went back to school. 

Sixth Internship Experience!

On Tuesday the 21, I visited the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences for my sixth internship experience. Christine was busy doing work so I had to clean the tank by myself. I re-cleaned some of the rocks that I had preciously cleaned and found a few more aiptasias. I then started to clean another rock. This rock was fairly big and took me about twenty minutes to clean. I then cleaned another rock. This one had a ton of plant junk on it. Because of this, the rock took me about thirty minutes. By the end about half of the tank's rocks had been cleaned. I then cleaned up my station and went back to school.

Fifth Internship Experience!

On Monday, the 13th, I visited the Houston Museum of Natrual Sciences to work at my internship. Christine Batten, my mentor, was not there to help me because she was sick. This meant that I had to work alone. This turned out to be a good thing because it let me test my knowledge of the tank and equipment. I gathered the equipment and went upstairs to work on the tank. I then quickly re-cleaned some rocks that I had previously cleaned. This didn't take long so I had time to do other rocks. I pt those rocks back in the tank and then I took out another rock. I cleaned that rock of all of the aiptasias, plant junk, and flatworms. This took me about thirty minutes since there was so much plant junk. This plant junk was very hard to get off because it was so stuck. At the end of this rock,it was nearly time for me to leave. I then quickly cleaned off the tank and put my equipment away. I then had to go back to POHS.

Fourth Internship Experience

On Monday, January 6, I visited the HMNS again for my internship. This was the first time that I worked independently because Christine, my mentor, had to do some more work. She helped me gather materials and take the top off of the tank. She then went to go do her work and I started to clean rocks. I re-cleaned some of the rocks that I had previously cleaned. I did this just to make sure that all of the flatworms and other junk was off of them. I then moved on to cleaning a new rock. This rock was pretty big so it took me a longer time to clean. I cleaned off most of the junk in the first ten minutes because a lot of the junk on the rock were plants. The plants were pretty long so I could just pluck them off. After most of the big junk was cleaned off, I had to start cleaning the smaller junk on the rock. This took a really long time since I could just pull this small junk off of the rock, I had to scrub it really hard with a toothbrush. After finishing this rock, I placed it back into the tank. As I was doing this Christine had just arrived to help me clean up. We cleaned the surrounding area of water and then took all our materials back down to where they belonged. I felt like I learned a ton this time at my internship because I had to put my skills to the test, since I didn't have the option to ask Christine how to do this or that.

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. 

Second Internship Experience!

On Monday Dec. 23, I went back to the Houston Museum of Natrual Science for my second time attending my internship. When I arrived, work started right away. Christine Batten and I wanted to clean as many rocks as we could. We wanted to get rid of all of the flatworms, aiptasias, and junk plants that we could. To do this we set up a station outside of the tank. We had one rinse bucket and one bucket with two gallons of water and three drops of Flatworm RX. We then took one rock from the tank and dipped it in the bucket of Flatworm RX. This would kill all of the flatworms on the surface of the rock. We then had to go in with toothbrushes and scrub the rock until all the other flatworms, aphasias, and junk plants were gone. We then rinsed the rocks with salt water so that no harmful chemicals would go in the water. Each rock took about twenty minutes to complete. We worked on two rocks together and then Christine started cleaning the tank. I finished cleaning another rock while she cleaned the part of the tank where we were putting the rocks back in. We put all. The clean rocks back in the tank and then it was time to go. Overall, this internship has helped me learn so much more about marine life and how to maintain saltwater fishe tanks. It has also taught me more about how to care for animals.