A normal day for Ricky Critchfield, a PhD student at the University of Florida (UF), consists of being assigned to travel with his mentor, Dr. Dorota Porazinska, to the Nebraska Sandhills to look for a nematode called Tobrilidae. He is also a nematology student, and he is considered to be a ‘jack of all trades’ when it comes to Nematology. Nematology, according to Critchfield, is the study of “microscopic worms”
What Type of Nematodes He Focuses On And His Roles During The Trip
The nematodes that he focused on are called “free living" nematodes. That's what we call them. And those are nematode free-living nematodes or nematodes that, do not parasitized insects or, people or animals or bugs or anything. They just live in the environment.”. These nematodes are considered to be ‘good’ nematodes because they “are extremely important for soil health. If you dig up like a thing of soil, you will find nematodes in them. And they are very important for the nitrogen and carbon cycle in soil environments. And they are like extremely important to the ecology as well. They've, a lot of nematodes feed on other microbes. They feed on fungi.”
Critchfield’s roles on the trip were he performed sample gathering, which according to Critchfield, consisted of the team “going out into the lake and choosing four separate points because we need replicates in order for this to be statistically representative. And so, when we pick up a bucket of muck from the water, we choose a spot. We, collect the GPS coordinates, and we kind of in that general area, we'll choose like two, usually three like cores in the sediment and put them in a bag and then go back to shore. And we try to separate the different points with about 100m between them so that they're not, like in the same area. So that's those are the general steps to doing it. And so, we've seen you out in that kayak in some pretty choppy, windy conditions and some pretty wild situations”. He was also tasked with a lot of lab work, such as data analysis, doing molecular tests with the nematode samples, and other things of that nature.
Personal Note
On a personal note, Critchfield at first actually didn’t expect to study nematology. He said that he did his “masters in Plant Pathology and that was on, plant parasitic nematodes. So I thought that was just an extension of plant pathology, so I never expected it.” He also said that in the nematology department at UF, they “ have a joke in the department. You don't choose the nematode life. The nematode life chooses you. It's just nobody really expects to go into it, so it kind of just happens to you, and you find that you really want to do it. So that's ultimately how I got in. Is it kind of just happened to me as opposed to something I intentionally did, I love it.”
Future Endeavors
In a concluding statement, Critchfield said that once he is graduated from UF, he doesn’t want to be a professor, but he actually wants to “work at somewhere like the USDA or some institute where I'm performing nematology. That's the ultimate goal”.
Credits:
Ricky Critchfield and Dr. Shane White