Wallowing Out

Man has it been a day. It started out with me going into the lab and gathering together the necessities for collecting soil samples for Enterococci; plastic gloves, plastic spoons, plastic Ziplocs, and a trusty sharpie. Then I went to the transportation service center to pick up the vehicle Greg requested and I headed out into the Manoa Valley Watershed to see what I could find in the way of pig wallows. Also on my to-do list was to exchange clean memory cards for the ones hopefully containing pig images on the gamecams I had installed over the last 20 days. With that in mind I went to Lyon Arboretum first, one of the locations of one of the gamecams. On my hike up I looked for areas that seemed to have been disturbed by pig activity. Since this was an arboretum and was kept up by a maintenance crew regularly I was unable to detect any pig wallows. On my next hike, to Manoa Falls I was able to find an area of some pig activity back of the path a bit and took samples from the disturbed area and from a normal area of the same growth type. It was on my next hike that I hit the jackpot. I went to the Pu’u Pia site next because I had to switch out the memory card. Along the way I found four great areas of definite pig browsing and wallowing. I collected from them and headed back to the lab to start running the Enterococci tests on the samples. When I got back, Victor had already prepared a saltwater dilution for me, but it was not enough so I got to get some practice in of my own; the saltwater separates the bacteria from the soil. I then weighed out 5 grams of each sample, being a total of 20 (two from each wallow and correlating non-wallow). I then added 100 ml to each sample and put them all on the shaker for 45 minutes. While that was going on I prepared the next step and also returned the car. I then had to further dilute those samples to 1/10 and 1/100 solutions, by adding DI water. After that was all taken care of, I added Enterolert, a powder used to Enterococci identification, to all of the diluted samples. Those were placed into these interesting wells, which were finally put into the oven over night. Finally I was done with my work for today and headed to the Bruland’s to have dinner. On my way home I had to check the oven in the lab to make sure it was at the proper temperature. It was a full day, but with only two days left on the island I’m going to have two more full days coming up.