At this precise moment, Candice is working at the Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C. - measuring crustacean claws as part of a study for her PhD.
Or, she might be sleeping. (I can never get those time-differences right ... )
At any rate, this is her lovely little brownstone ...
She's even famous now, in a "The Lost Symbol
" kind of way, toiling away in the crustacean collections in Pod 5* at the Museum Support Centre (MSC), a high-security warehouse in the sketchy part of town.
*The same section of the warehouse featured in Dan Brown's book ... in case you haven't read it yet.
And how does Candice spend her days in DC? She's on the bus at 7:30, heading to the Natural History Museum in downtown DC, where she catches the shuttle to the warehouse facility where the crustacean collections are housed.
In to her little lab in the wet collections rooms by 8:30, she starts taking photos of crab claws and measuring the sizes of the shell and legs - for different specimens and different species. It sounds like quick work, but given she has to take 3 measurements of each crab leg (and each crab has 8 measurable legs), she may just be there ... all year.
Not really. But I'm sure that's how she feels sometimes. 10-15 minutes per crab x a warehouse full of crabs = significant porters needed at the end of the day.
Candice measures claws on her own, but has lunch with the other 10-15 researchers who work at the warehouse measuring, cataloging and sorting other types of invertebrates. They all chat and sometimes have science talks, so it's been a great way to meet everyone else.
Then it's back home again, to forget about claws for 12 hours or so.
And why is she doing all this? Candice is looking for tradeoffs between claw size and other morphology among different crustacean species - compensatory mechanisms (like we just learned about with geckoes). We'll talk more about the science after she gets back.
(all the pictures in this post were provided by Candice. Thanks!)
Or, she might be sleeping. (I can never get those time-differences right ... )
At any rate, this is her lovely little brownstone ...
She's even famous now, in a "The Lost Symbol
" kind of way, toiling away in the crustacean collections in Pod 5* at the Museum Support Centre (MSC), a high-security warehouse in the sketchy part of town.*The same section of the warehouse featured in Dan Brown's book ... in case you haven't read it yet.
And how does Candice spend her days in DC? She's on the bus at 7:30, heading to the Natural History Museum in downtown DC, where she catches the shuttle to the warehouse facility where the crustacean collections are housed.
In to her little lab in the wet collections rooms by 8:30, she starts taking photos of crab claws and measuring the sizes of the shell and legs - for different specimens and different species. It sounds like quick work, but given she has to take 3 measurements of each crab leg (and each crab has 8 measurable legs), she may just be there ... all year.
Candice measures claws on her own, but has lunch with the other 10-15 researchers who work at the warehouse measuring, cataloging and sorting other types of invertebrates. They all chat and sometimes have science talks, so it's been a great way to meet everyone else.
Then it's back home again, to forget about claws for 12 hours or so.
And why is she doing all this? Candice is looking for tradeoffs between claw size and other morphology among different crustacean species - compensatory mechanisms (like we just learned about with geckoes). We'll talk more about the science after she gets back.
(all the pictures in this post were provided by Candice. Thanks!)