Hail; also Cage + Crab = ???

I apologize for the lack of post yesterday, couldn't make it down to the Institute to make a proper post. I do, however, have some cool stuff to share.

So yesterday's main job apart from a bit of reading for my project was to take salinity well data for a few marsh sites. This is more along the lines of the rain-outs I mentioned early on - research looking into whether the mussel mounds actually have any effect on the salinity of the water around them, and if that helps the grasses out during drought years.

The wells themselves are small PVC pipes perforated to allow water in, and then capped to keep the tides out. In order to take a reading, you use a pump and a fancy piece of equipment called a refractometer to measure the salt concentration. So we did this for a bunch of sites in Lighthouse, looking at different salinities at different areas. Haven't had a chance to look at the data so don't ask me specifics on any findings.

About halfway through this process, though, the weather took a turn for the worse. Initially we soldiered on and only got rained on a bit, managing to blast through all of Lighthouse, but as we made it into Oakdale, the lightning was coming on hard and fast enough to spook us back. We get into the mule (it's basically a rugged golf cart and our transportation mainstay), and one of the grad students has texted us essentially telling us to get the heck back home. So we do. Just in time to miss penny-sized hail. Craziness!

The sad part is that the storm was bad enough to wreck our rain-outs. Those're getting fixed to some extent, but we're trying a mesocosm (bucket) experiment to do the same sort of thing off the field. Today we gathered mussels to that goal. Doing so basically involved shoveling a chunk out of the marsh with a mussel mound in it and lugging it off the marsh. Fun stuff.

But the exciting part.

And oh is it exciting.

My main project for today was prototyping crab cages for my experiment. I'll detail my stuff in a later post - not sure how secretive I need to be, not to mention it's still in the works. The design is pretty brilliant - kind of like a crazy, hardware cloth (mesh) tube just big enough to get shoved into the marsh with a single crab and some snails for it to munch on and enough space to burrow.

Much too big!

Looking better..

One in the ground, with crabby inside.

And a different one, with dead oyster shell piled up around it to keep him nice and cooled off through the blistering heat of low tide.

This is more of the crazy, cool, DIY side of doing ecology. I designed them myself with a little guidance, and then I  ended up making like, 6 or 7 of these guys from scratch and scrap material today. It was kind of a Goldilocks experience. The first one (first picture above) was far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far too big (my adviser's words, not mine). The next few (I thought) would be too small, but they're the ones we ended up deploying. They may be just right.

But, my job tomorrow is to check in and make sure nobody's dead, that they can feed in there on the snails we gave them, etc. Oh, and that nobody escaped. Because despite the fact that I used like, 30 cable ties to hold the mesh together, these are essentially Houdini's crustacean counterparts. But with any luck this'll work and I'll be on my way to an excellent research project.