Peroxide blonde

I've been cleaning all of my samples from last summer. The idea is to get all the organic gunk out, because  all I want to analyze is the chemistry of the shell, not the chemistry of the other stuff. This translates to a lot of sitting very still and working with very tiny things.

The cleaning process happens at 65ºC, which takes a while to stabilize.

Not quite at 65ºC. Yet.

I can't emphasize how tiny each sample is. I keep them in little microscope slides with 10 wells (each sample gets its own well. They are really small.

This is my entire summer's worth of work.

Each one is the size of a grain of sand. You pick them up with a tiny paintbrush, the kind you might use to paint the facial expression on a tiny model man standing on the deck of a ship built inside of a bottle.

My brush is named Otis.

Then I crack each shell open with the point of a scalpel.

I was pretty impressed by all the cytoplasm and other ... well, organic goo that was inside of some of them. So I literally peroxided the snot out of them, and now they're clean. I scavenged some foam from a buddy and built a little foam raft so the samples could ride on the 65ºC bath. I'm sure Fisher Scientific has a version for sale for $30, but mine works just fine.