Day 5

1300: We have results! I arrived today and there was actually material for me to look at: a sow in the old house farrowed yesterday and she had one stillborn piglet. I also had to look at the placenta for mummies, but there was nothing there that I could definitely identify as a mummified foetus.

That took about 20 minutes, and I wasn't due in the Bacteriology department until 11am, so I sat an watched an otter post mortem in the PM room. A zoology student at Glasgow is doing her Honours project on otters, so she has collected 28 (legitimate) dead otters from around Scotland to study. Members of the public who find them bring the otters to centres all over the country, where they're kept frozen - that's how she has so many. Most are roadkill. The student is bringing them here for the PM room staff to look at and analyse.

This otter is a definite roadkill - there's haemorrhage into the abdominal cavity from a ruptured liver, and several of the ribs are fractured. Apparently, being killed on the roads is now a major cause of death in the UK's otter population, now that the rivers and coastline have been cleaned up significantly.

At 11am I went up to Bacteriology to look at my samples. Today I had to streak the tetrathionate broth (now hopefully with lots of bacteria) onto DCA and SS agar plates: there were 16 samples, so that was 32 plates to streak. It has to be one of the most boring things to do in a lab like that - to sit and streak plates out all day!

The plates are now in the incubator and I'm free for the weekend!

2330: I had a nice evening - my family and I went to Edinburgh to pick up one of my cousins who is working there over the summer, then we went out to East Fortune airfield so the boys could see Scotland's Concorde, G-BOAA. We had dinner, then headed back via the Royal Yacht Britannia and the Forth Bridge. Got in quite late, but it was worth it!