North Wales forams (or absence thereof)

When last year we moved our annual third year fieldtrip to Anglesey, one of the things we had to do was to start making a new training set of modern foraminifera. With the students, we took a lot of samples, and in the lab, we analysed the foraminifera assemblages for us much as we could within the limited time. And then the students had to look at the results and see what they could conclude from them in their final assessment of the module. And the results were a bit patchy; we just had one day in the lab, and not all samples had been done, and some samples had only been done in such a limited way it was not statistically robust. And there were a few results I wanted to verify. Some samples had strange counts! And there are several things that can have gone wrong; a misidentification, or just the logging of results in the wrong column of table. That sort of thing. So I wanted to go back to these samples and make a cleaner version of the training set. I hadn't got around to that for a long time, but now, after term was over and all the marking had been done, I figured I had time for that. So I emailed our lab staff to ask if they had the samples ready for me. No answer. I phoned over a Teams a few times but again no answer. Then I sent another email with high priority. The lab technician got back to me; she said she wouldn't be there the next Monday, and asked where the samples were. I said they should be in the lab and I would show up on Tuesday. And so I did.

The lab technician was not there and I had no ide where the samples were. With other technical staff are looked for them, but they were nowhere to be seen. I just went home. They were not found. 

It's disappointing that we had quite a range of samples and they seemed to have just been thrown away. But it does mean I now have time for other things. We will just have to start from scratch this year! And we will approach the topic in slightly more simplified way. Better few samples analysed well, than lots of samples analysed not so well!

In the field with the students

What we do this for: link the modern assemblages to those found in a fossil core, like this one