So today and yesterday was all working on last minute stuff for the first mini-project, and today I broke it down to start it up again somewhere else.
I think I'd mentioned that we were having some issues with the snails - if not, for some reason, the site we'd picked had snails that really, really liked to climb even in the absence of crabs. This means our control (no crab) plots had really high height values despite the lack of crab. Kind of a bad basis for comparison. They climb for other reasons too - heat the most common thing. The water that pools in the marsh's floor tends to superheat in the sun which isn't nice if you're a snail.
So we're moving it to greener, less climby pastures; ramping down the scale to 40 centimeters (a bit beyond the range we'd detected in the first trial); and placing our distance markers down closer together to really get a finer picture of the process. Also, we're gonna take radulation data - a fancy term for a measure of how much grass the snails are eating (with their radula, a sort of scrapy tongue thing they have) - in order to look at that. So it'll be running for the rest of the summer (snails eat slooooowly) to that end.
It still needs bamboo, crabs, and baseline data on the radulations, so that's my job for tomorrow. Then Monday I'm going off island for a food run and coming back with a Jenn in tow! This'll be a fun next few days. I'll be showing her the island and we may start working on getting my main project - which will focus on the dispersion of the crabs, i.e how they're spread out in a plot - rolling. I'll let y'all know how it goes and give a better breakdown of the main project soon.
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