First Field Day

So, essentially, this blog is going to be the receptacle for all of my experiences, musings, et cetera during my summer internship working in the muddy, boggy, hot Georgia salt marshes at Sapelo Island. Today was my first day of serious field work, having just arrived yesterday.

As a brief overview of what we did today, we were basically setting up fancy tents with tarps over them for an experiment trying to simulate drought conditions. The idea is that mussel mounds in the marsh manage to keep the marsh grasses from being totally obliterated by die-off during droughts (which is an interesting aside in itself). It's been observed in the past, but the project's trying to quantify and experimentally prove its occurrence while looking into why it happens. There are some interesting ideas abound - the mussels reduce salinity which kills the grasses, or it could be the result of some of the species on the mounds.

It boiled down to a lot of long, somewhat grueling work though, piecing together PVC and putting grommets into the tarps and whatnot. I got to operate a dremel and a drill press to put holes into the PVC to basically tie it all down like a rain fly. Yay power tools? Dad would probably be proud, due to his extensive hobby of woodworking in his free time. A lot of ecology is fun, free-form DIY. These projects get a little bit ridiculous in my limited experience with people coming up with really oddball solutions to making experiments work. It's a side of ecology most people don't ever think about - the power tools, the crafty solutions, the manual labor.

Back to the marshes, though. They're fun, but they get ludicrously hot around mid-day. I am literally already minorly sunburnt. And the mud. Mud essentially manages to get everywhere you can possibly imagine, and once it's there it's hard to rid yourself of. I feel like we belong on an episode of Dirty Jobs. But in a good way!

The marsh itself is jam-packed with crabs. There are Sesarma, or purple marsh crabs, which are mainly herbivores and have a wicked cool neon purple coloration on their bellies; Panopeus and Eurytium, both mud crabs (black clawed and white clawed, respectively); and fiddlers literally everywhere you step. Standing still and quiet, the marsh literally crackles with their motion as they sift through the mud for food. Pretty cool. Birds, too. Osprey, and wood storks, which are cool and kind of rare, from what I hear. Vultures are practically ubiquitous.

Tomorrow we're due to go out and just hike around and think and get a feel for the area. I'm supposed to have my project at least conceptualized by the end of the next week. Should be fun. Bit nerve-wracking though. I have an idea going but I'm not sure if it'll work. We'll see!

P.S - I'll be doing a follow up post when I get a chance to go over some of how the island itself is beyond the marshes. Also, eventually there will be pictures, but the internet here is too shoddy for even basic uploads.