Today we spent the day in the lab and started off by familiarizing ourselves with the phytolith reference slides then progressing to make our own slides for Mud and Perch lake. There is definitely an art to making these slides! In this picture Ma’Ko Qua is mixing the lake samples with the micro-spheres we added in the centrifuge. We had lots of fun throughout the slide making process and found using the centrifuge to be the most fun. It was definitely more challenging to look at phytoliths in the lake samples compared to the reference slides we had been looking at previously because the lake slides contained other phytolith types besides wild rice phytoliths.