So I worked my butt off, through high tide, through two storms (no thunder or lightning, no worries) and most of the day, but the second mini project is ready and running. I was going to take pictures, but I'm a slacker. And other than that nothing really cool happened today, so this post goes out to weird things I've noticed!
Firstly, crab legs are sharp. I wrangled like 8+ crabs today and I had a whiteclaw, missing one of his claws, cut the heck out of my hand with his legs. Not the claw, his legs. Weird! Also painful!
Secondly, white claws are distinctly harder for me to find than black claws. I found all 4 of my black claws for this setup before I found a single white of the right size. Is annoying. Black claws are so easy in comparison - all you really need to do is find a mussel mound or a burrow with a mussel shell across the top. The crabs actually like the shell - it's a nice buffer against the heat of the sun. They're smart enough to find and actively maintain the position of the shell while they hold that burrow. Seems to be something that only the blackclaws really do though.
Lastly for this post is a cool little mini-rant about cross-ecosystem ecology. This is a mouthful way of saying that you have critters moving from one system to another and doing stuff in the other system. An example - the marsh is full of good examples - raccoons. They will enter the marsh from the forest (one ecosystem to another) to forage during the night on food in the marsh, thus bringing about an effect.
The examples in the marsh specifically are endless. From the sea, you get things like fish, blue crabs, and other large predators coming in during the high tide to feed. From land, you get raccoons, fire ants, grasshoppers, etc. coming in to feed, and then weirder things. Feral pigs often come in to wallow and to some small extent feed. Their feet are essentially like spears, though, cutting up the grass and the roots beneath as they move. And wallowing too wrecks the marsh. One of our grad students is currently looking into how strong of an effect these guys have. We also have feral cows and of course deer, all coming into the marsh by low tide for various reasons.
The possibilities are mind-boggling and the effects hard to study. Which is really unfortunate, because cross-ecosystem stuff is really cool. You have all of the above going on in addition to the infaunal (resident) stuff like the crabs I study and so forth. Ecology is delightfully complicated.
No comments:
Post a Comment