Not too shabby for a garage in the middle of nowhere

We did it! Somehow Dr. Dave Sandstrom (University of Maryland) and I managed to put together this makeshift molecular biology lab in the garage of our field station. It may not look like much, but we will be extracting DNA from marine slugs and a variety of green algae here. The aquaria will be part of a separate experiment in our project where we will keep some slugs in light and some in the dark to prevent the kleptoplasts from photosynthesizing. The idea is that the sea slug Elysia diomedea may use kleptoplasty as part of a defense mechanism in which it makes its mucus less palatable to predators. This project seems pretty appropriate for a group of high school students, the only thing that worries me is the lack of time we will have to conduct our experiments.