Mercury Moss Procedure

The procedure for our internship is pretty simple. The first step was to make sure that everything was clean. We washed the buckets, hairnets, and containers with ivory soap, rinsed with tap water, and then rinsed them again with distilled water. After making sure everything was clean we washed the moss with distilled water  and placed it in the cleaned container. We then filled the container up half way with distilled water and submerged the moss in it. We soaked the moss  for 24 hours, rinsed it and soaked again for 5 hours. We let the moss dry completely and then placed 3g of moss into the each hairnet with 35 in total. Before we could go out and hang the moss bags to the poles, we had to actually assemble them. We made poles in a T formation and attached strings to the sides for the moss to hang down. We also made a mark 10 inches from the bottom of the pole to know how deep to place it into the ground. Once the poles were made and the moss was ready to be hanged we went to our locations in East Haven and planted them. The poles will stay up for 3 weeks and then we gather the moss and send it to be analyzed.