Another project that Brian Mealey is working on is analyzing blood samples. He goes out to the keys, and takes blood samples from bald eagles, and ospreys. He takes a boat out to different mangrove islands in Florida Bay to find these birds. He searches their nests for eaglets and baby ospreys. We have to wait about 35 days to be able to work with the birds. When we return in 35 days a blood sample is taken from the wing and the nestling are banded with a federal identification number. Once we had the blood samples, the blood had to be separated by using a centrifuge to separate the serum from the blood cells.

The serum is what we actually work with. We do the same kinds of test on the blood that doctors would do if he was testing your blood, only that human blood is much more dangerous than the blood we work with and has to be handled very carefully and every ounce is considered biohazardous material. The actual testing is done at the museum. You see we have kits of slides to test for different substances in the blood. The slides are the ones that test for the different substances. Different kits, contains slides which we enter into three different blood analyzers. The different slides from the test kits, test for different elements. The analyzers actually do the analyzing.

The procedure is as follows, we warm the slides to room temperature. We (one of us) remove a slide from it's package and load the slide into the corresponding analyzer, after making sure that the machine (analyzer) is ready. We then enter the patients identification, this being the birds tag number into the analyzer, so that we identify the results with that bird. We use the least possible amount of the serum for each slide, considering that there is allot of slides needed to be used per blood sample and that each blood sample has a limited amount of serum, by using a pipette. The pipette is an instrument, much like a dropper, only it takes a precise amount of 10 microliters of a liquid, in this case being the serum. We put a disposable tip on the pipette in which is where the serum will be stored. Then, like if we were using a dropper, only more complicated, we aspirate (suck up the serum) into the disposable tip. Then we spot the slide which means we drop the precise amount of liquid into the slide. The information for the samples are then printed on the main analyzer and once the machine is ready, another slide can be tested.

The main purpose of this project is to create baseline norms for the serum chemistries of eagles and ospreys (in south Florida anyway). In other words, we want to know the normal values for different substances in the blood of a bird. For example, doctors of today, know what are normal amounts of sugar in the blood of humans. But they did not know that right away. They had to test human blood for many years to find the correct value of sugar in people.That is what Brian is doing except for eagles and osprey of south Florida.