Foraminifera Summer
An SRJC-BML Internship Story
My name is Xochilt Campos and I have completed my third year at Santa Rosa Junior College. I am transferring to Sonoma State University in the fall to study Biology. This summer I spent time in the Ocean Climate Lab working under Lucy Bates. Lucy is a PhD student focusing on San Francisco Bay foraminifera.
This summer was spent mainly making a foraminifera field guide to help Lucy in the future to identify different foraminifera. A foraminifera is a unicellular protist that makes a shell found in the sediment or floating around in the ocean and even brackish waters. This field guide was time consuming because there isn’t much information out there on the foraminifera we were looking at. There were eight foraminifera in total that we were looking at. My days mainly consisted of doing research, taking pictures of foraminifera and then compiling what I found into the field guide. The photos we took are the best on the foraminifera we are looking at since most foraminifera pictures are taken under scanning electron microscopes which don’t look like how the foraminifera look under the microscope. One day we went out to Doran beach and collected sediment samples. Once we got those samples we processed them and looked for different foraminifera in the sand. Another thing I did during this internship was present my findings from the Bodega sediment to the Friday Forum when Lucy did her Friday Foram Forum.
This internship really was an amazing experience. Everyone was so supportive and open and willing to help. Learning different lab techniques used when processing sediment was fun and then learning how to look through literature and manage my time doing research was eye opening. I also learned more about career paths and what people did to get to their positions which really helped me feel more confident in my educational journey.
About the Program:
The SRJC-BML Internship Program provides summer research opportunities for Santa Rosa Junior College students at the Bodega Marine Laboratory.