Day 8

0900: Arrive at vet school to find three very full boxes awaiting my inspection. Four sows have farrowed and I have 9 piglets to look at. I didn't see anything unusual, most of the piglets were stillborn (i.e. dead at birth), but two had been lain on by their mothers. Which, given the size difference between sow (250kg+) and piglet (1.2kg), is pretty fatal for the piglet.

1100: Up to Bacteriology for the next part of the Salmonella testing. I took the agar plates I streaked out and looked for any traces of bacterial growth - Salmonella colonies are typically white to yellowish with a black centre. There were a few plates with this type of growth, so bacterial colonies from these were innoculated into urea broth. The yellow broth goes pink if there isn't any Salmonella, but stays yellow if there is - it's basically another step in the isolation of the bacteria. This took about 20 minutes again.

1800: I heard the Honours student was coming back today to do the rest of the otters, so I went to see if I could watch and ending up helping out in the PM room for the rest of the day. The otters were weighed and measured, then opened up to identify their cause of death. We weighed some of the organs from each otter, and took lots of tissue samples for pollution analysis, amongst other things. I got to weigh the organs and help take swabs for bacterial culture - had great fun! Think we'll be doing this all week - bring it on!