More Baby Animals, More Cages, More Blood

So the lab-wide die off project is up and running. We woke up super early to catch the first ferry out and rocked it into the marsh by 2 PM. It was good, solid work and I'm looking forward to a veeeery good night's sleep. This was all over at St. Simons Island, in case I hadn't mentioned.

We're following up on my initial die-off project, looking at how snail climbing response to crabs and the subsequent grazing vary in a die-off context. Basically, we put my tiny crab cages in, and then we put bigger cages around them to exclude snails.

It's what's called a "factorial" design. Some plots have nothing. No crab, no snails. Some have snails but no crabs, then crabs but no snails, and then both. It's a fancy way of showing what happens with nobody, just one species, and then the combined interaction of the two. We're expecting lots more grazing in the both species treatment, none in the no snail treatments, and mild in the no crab treatment. Sorry if that's a bit confusing on paper, it's really pretty simple.

On a sidenote, though, while we were out there, we saw baby diamondback terrapins! Two of them. I have a third that was dead when we found him. I kept the shell, but it's a bit meaty still, so I'm going to let the fire ants and nature have at it for a bit.

 

Cute little fellas. On the way back I stopped by our visitor's center finally and picked myself out a shirt and got Jenn a medallion for her hiking stick. They're neat. Tomorrow? Data, data, data! Getting down to the last little hustle.

More babies!

So just a quick update. Tomorrow we set up the stuff from yesterday. Today, I took a bit more data, and also found out what that chuck will's widow was up to.

Nesting! Adorable!

Oh yeah and there was a green anole. I was amazed. Literally the second one I've seen on the island all summer. We have skinks and racerunners aplenty but almost none of these guys.

Cool stuff.

Cages and Blood and Baby Birds

A mid-day post, oh goodness! And on time, too!

So I'm in the midst of a break in cage building. My advisor leaves in about an hour :( There's been a rush to get some cards and stuff together to see him off. I'll let y'all know how that goes.

But on a lighter note, I have wildlife to share!

I found this little guy on the wall outside of our trailer. Adorable.

This morning after taking some cages out of the marsh, I went for a walk to the roost. The roost was pretty empty, but I did spot this little guy on the way. He's a chuck-will's-widow, so named for their call. They're nocturnal, so this guy was pretty sleepy.

More of him.

But the capstone to the experience was this. These are baby egrets, or possibly great blue herons. They're thoroughly adorable. We may go back later. I'll post more pics if I get any! And as always, high res shots on my flickr

Roosts and Die Offs and Parties, Oh My!

Apologies. As the summer winds to a close, I seem to get more busy instead of less busy, so thereby this blog suffers. Some days it's just very hard to make it down to the institute to publish stuff. Only so many hours in the day. And our trailer's wifi is...well, a poor excuse for wifi, as I'm learning right now. My goals for this week are as follows:

-We're setting up another die off project as a whole lab thing on St Simons where the snail densities and sizes are bigger and scarier. Mine's still going but this one will likely become its own paper, which I'm going to be co-authoring as far as I know. My involvement'll be building the cages and setting it all up.
-I need to do two surveys. Surveys are fun and not as good evidence as real experiments, but still a good addition to any paper. These'll be focused on my Range project, which was the one looking into the range of snail responses to the crabs.
-Assorted other data, and maybe taking out cages from one of my advisor's old projects.

Speaking of my advisor, he's moving to England tomorrow :( So we're having a get together tonight, rather soon. We just got done with a tennis tournament, and this morning we picked out plots for the aforementioned die off project.

Thursday if I recall was just a data day, and yesterday likewise, but the cool thing was, I finally checked out this roost I'd spotted on the edge of the marsh. No pictures yet, but there were wading birds of all description. Spoonbills, egrets, maybe some nightherons.

Oh yeah and I had a green heron check me out in the marsh one day. He circled me once or twice and I was like whaaat.

But yeah! Business! But I'm pleased to announce I should be fully done with this project and home by probably the end of next week (~the 10th). So yeah. Light at the end of the tunnel. That's something, isn't it?

Sweet, Beautiful Data

Data is probably the hardest part of being a scientist. Collection is tedious and time consuming as it is, as is analysis, but the suspense of getting "good" data, whatever your study constitutes as being good, is probably the most dreadful part of doing research. Even after setting up 4 different experiments this summer, it's impossible to get past the looming, very real potential horror of setting up an experiment that just doesn't work.

That said, today it all paid off. I took radulations for Range, my initial pet project looking into the range (hardy-har) of the snail response to mud crabs. And they're gorgeous. There's a huge effect in the first 10 centimeters, and very little beyond it. It's great. That was the final major piece of that project, and it's done.

That said, I still have die-off to do, and we need to validate to see if using bamboo to measure climbing heights (as we did in Range) mimics the real thing. That'll require a quick setup tomorrow and some data for the rest of the week. I was going to confirm some density data on Range too - just to be sure that the crabs don't make the snails migrate across the mud too to avoid them.

Oh, and I need to do some surveys to piece the rest of this project together and solidify it. But those'll be fun, honestly. A nice bit of icing on the cake.

Sidenote, I gave a talk to a room full of people today on my work. I winged it, and it was honestly kinda cool. Nerve-wracking at first. But yeah. Neat!

Reprisal

So apologies for the lull in posts - I went back to Tallahassee for what's likely to be my last weekend off. Mostly just hung out - saw the Dark Knight Rises with Jenn. I highly recommend it. I dunno if it necessarily tops the second film but it's very good nonetheless. Go watch it!

Today was another day of pure data. I regret to admit that dispersion may be getting set aside. Just wasn't working out. Dead crabs, crabs getting into control plots, and misbehaving snails that didn't show any real trend. Oh well, though. Die-off and Range still look good and I have a few other ideas up my sleeve. If nothing else this is a nice "welcome to the real world" - projects sometimes don't work at all despite all the effort you put into them, where others, even simple ones that were set up in an afternoon (die-off), pull through brilliantly.

Another cool feature of die-off apart from the obvious - there are enough snails and enough damage to really seriously bend and break some of these leaves. It may be an important piece of the puzzle and it's one I plan on taking data on when I do final radulations.

But, to make up for my lack of posts, I have two science crabs for the price of one to show off, and another marsh oddity.

This, my friends, is a mussel (black, center of the pic) inside of a dead mussel (in white, surrounding it). I dub it, MUSSEL-CEPTION.

This little guy may have picked a bit too big of a PVC pole for crab-catching. Why he'd want to catch more of his kind beats me.

Much to my chagrin, both the crab gymnastics program AND the new marsh research site marking Crab Flags (tm) product pitch failed.

Oh god. I just realized. I've become one of those people who makes lolcats. ONLY WITH CRABS. D:

Science Crabs Part 2

Ladies and gents, I present to you the second image in my Science Crabs series. Today's subject is a white-claw with a knack for meter sticks.

When I asked him, he said he was trying very hard to measure his armspan. Unfortunately, he can't read.

 

 

 

 

On a more serious note, I had some cool finds today. First off, I found an oyster cluster.

Note the mussel on the bottom left (upper right is oysters). Mussels naturally occur throughout the marsh, but these guys seem to have taken one for an anchoring point.

These are an odd sight in the marsh beyond the creeks, where they are abundant. These guys were close to a very small tributary, likely their source. Weird though.

Secondly, some very dry, drought-like marsh.

This stuff is bad news because it's one corner of the die-off trifecta. When drought stresses plants, they become more vulnerable to snail grazing and subsequent fungal infection, which is often lethal and clears out strips of the marsh. I don't think it's bad enough here - this is a path, actually - but the marsh is usually much, much wetter. Muddy like quicksand.

More Data, More Wilderness

So I'm up this early trying to register for an Ecology Lab, but y'all guys get a blog post out of it, so whoo.

The die-off project is up and has had data taken on it. Looking good so far. I take more today and some on Dispersion. I'll let y'all know how that goes.

On another note, 2 cool naturey things. First off, yesterday I looked out the window of our trailer to behold this!

 

Deer are absurdly common out here, but it was still kinda neat. Never seen them come into our area directly - they usually hang out on the outskirts. Including the albino deer.

Also as I sit here waiting to register for that course, outside are lots and lots of these little guys.

 

I really, really want to wrangle them. But I have things to doooooo. :( 

Update: 

Looooool.

Double update sorry lol:

So I was talking to Jenn earlier about my need to do a survey for my project. In ecology, a survey is anything where you're only taking data - no experimental manipulations, just telling it how it is. In psychology (her field) a survey is a questionnaire given to participants in your study. Well, today, at her request, I took a survey in the second definition.

Using the eraser maybe?

I don't think he understands pencils.

Fun fact - these guys froth at the mouth when stressed.

I am debating having a science crabs photo shoot. Maybe one a day.

Also here is a pregnant fiddler crab:

The eggs are that spongy mass beneath, being held in place by the plate of carapace just visible in this shot. See the crab anatomy lesson post - it's the broad plate that distinguishes female from male.

Cages and Blood

So aside from data, I've been very busy helping a roomie get her project up. This means cages. The big kind.

Building them by night at the institute.

Taking them into the marsh. Pulling a chunk out of the marsh and lining it with mesh so that crabs can't get in from beneath. Putting that chunk back in. Putting the cage on top of it.

Catching snails, counting them, measuring them, sorting them. Lots, and lots of work. I need a vacation.

Note: not a snail.

But we're almost done! And my die-off project is out as of today. So yeah, good times.

Data, Data, Data

As the title suggests, this is most of what's been going on this week so far. Tomorrow I'm going to pop off island to grab groceries, but in the meantime, starting tomorrow morning we're setting up one of my trailermates' projects. Which means cages in the marsh. Whooooo. At least I like working as a group. Is fun.

On another note, I may actually be setting up 3 projects this summer. Yes, you read that right. This one will focus on the same stuff (crab non-consumptive effects on snails) but in the context of die-off. Not sure what it'll be exactly, but it may be another thing going on tomorrow. In the meantime, since I wandered to one today, let me show you what a die-off looks like.

 

A die off, essentially, is a puddle of mud. With the saddest, most pitiful looking grass in it you'll ever see. They grow somewhat rapidly especially in dry regions, or in drought years, and the snail densities can be truly frightening inside of them.

 

I pulled 2 dozen snails off of the plant in the bottom picture (yes, there's a plant there) in a single sweep of the hand. I'm lucky to find plants with 5 snails on them elsewhere. 

Die-offs are a subject of heavy concern in the marsh, and a very prominent feature. The mussel mounds seem to mitigate the die-offs, a process we're looking into as a lab. I'd kind of like to investigate how the crabs influence die-off, given that mussel mounds tend to be packed with mud crabs. Not sure if the usually negative, climbing inducing effect of the crabs on the snails is mitigated by some other service of the mussels, or if the crabs divert the snails around the mounds altogether.

But I'd kind of like to find out.

The Infinite Soreness

So y'all likely remember my complaints about being sore and tired not but a couple of days ago. Yesterday was another one of those days. The morning we went out as a lab group to get transplants for a mesocosm (essentially. an experiment not done in the field but instead in a bucket or similar sized container) experiment. This consisted of essentially going out, finding a chunk of marsh that has the right qualities (in this case, it either had a mussel mound or didn't, and had a certain amount of grass). At this point, things get intensive.

First, you dig the edges out of this little plot, bit by bit. Then, as a team of 3 or so, you pry the block of marsh out with your shovels and flip it over onto its side. The bottom of the block is trimmed of root matter to make it sit flat in the tubs we brought with us. After that, the fiftyish pound slab is crammed into the tub, and lugged a few hundred yards off of the marsh and into a mule. Repeat 12 times for 12 plots. Fun, right?

We took each of these little mesocosms to the institute to chill out in a small pool of water. For those of y'all who have been reading for a while, they're for the drought project. The rain-outs just didn't come through for us, they ended up getting broken a lot during the storms and just didn't work out. These guys on the other hand are looking good.

Needless to say though my everything is now even more sore.

Yesterday afternoon on the other hand was data on the mini project, which I've dubbed Range. It got a bit tedious but was okay. Haven't entered it yet so I dunno what it looks like. I also had to fix a few aspects of the main project, dubbed Dispersion, so that the data will come out a bit better. Not looking forward to taking it, though. Update from today: Dispersion crabs are dying kinda a lot due to the heat, and I'm not really sure how best to take the data. It's gonna require an overhaul of some sort unfortunately.

Dunno. I think I've decided I dislike working alone. The morning was honestly kind of fun despite the intense labor. My labgroup is honestly great. A fun group of people. Working alone just gets kind of tedious, sometimes. It's hard to stay focused on 4+ hours of counting snails, or measuring their heights, or, like today, measuring the lengths of their grazing scars - radulations, they're called - on about 100+ stalks of grass. It's difficult to keep the end goal in mind. Sometimes it's even easy to lose sight entirely.

In general, though, this has been an interesting experience. In a short six weeks, I've had plenty to learn about the nature of field work and island life.

Heat is a fact of life here, and tolerance is paramount. When you're in the field, it's usually only in the upper 80's to lower 90's, but with the sun beating down on you and the superheated marsh water beneath you, it may as well be a desert. Some days I literally drink through an entire 2 liters of water on the marsh during a day's work. On a similar vein, the sun itself can be killer. It's darkened me by at least a few shades. My farmer's tan is still bad but I'm working on it! Luckily I've yet to burn myself to a crisp.

The mud, too. Mud gets everywhere and is everything. My first week I was a clean freak. Now? I don't care about it. My field shirts/pants are perpetually coated in the stuff, as is most of my body.

The work itself can vary greatly. Some projects? Data is easy. Others, like mine, it's mind numbing. The same way for the work involved to set it up. Some of it is incredibly physically taxing to assemble and break down. Mine was probably only somewhat. One of the roomies will have a very taxing project that will require all of us to chip in for coming up soon this week.

Honestly? Most of the time I don't get weekends. My work schedule is beyond irregular. Work is done when it's needed, which is most of the time, and there's no rhyme or reason to how long it takes.

It can be tough. And taxing, physically and mentally. But on the bright side? If I can do this, I can work probably just about anywhere. Oh, and I might still manage to get a publication out of it, which for an undergrad is outstanding. That's my light at the end of the tunnel.

Fluffy Stuff for the Non-Science Buffs

So if you're interested in the science and what I've been up to for the past 5 days, see the previous post. If not, and you just like the cool stuff I see out there, this post goes out to you!

Because last night, I saw a loggerhead turtle. Two, in fact.

These pictures are the same girlie, but she was pretty neat. We wanted to leave the other one be.

Yep. We went out to the beach just to swim (And also see the bio luminescence, another super cool feature of our beach. Basically swimming agitates little bacteria which glow bright blue. Kind of like swimming through a galaxy or something.) and in the process found a turtle!

Those pictures are edited to be in black and white because the original copies were red, actually. Bright, white light bothers the turtles, you see. They can't actually see red light, though, so it's more turtle friendly. So cool though. This was a great way to end such a difficult week - at some points it was really hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Ironically, too, I had just been telling one of the roomies that I'd really wanted to get out one night and see the turtles, too. Loggerheads are common on this beach at this time of year, but they nest in the wee hours (midnight to around 4 AM). This big girl came up onto the beach and dug herself a hole, but didn't do any laying. She'll probably be back tonight to lay proper.

I am debating going back out, but we'll see. It's  my day off so I have no plans. Whatsoever. It's beautiful.

The Longest Week Ever

Terribly sorry about the lack of posts. Let's break this down.

Wednesday I set out 18 plots, standardized them for plant size and density (by taking a whole lot of really specific data). Bamboo went in too.

Thursday I took radulations, caught a bunch of crabs for the cages, and picked out 6 more plots because we need a lot more control plots than we originally though.  Bamboo had to go into the new plots.

And yesterday. Yesterday I woke up literally before sunrise, and with the exception of a brief siesta during high tide, worked until nearly dusk. It has been a crazy hardcore week.

But it's done. It's finally done. All 24 plots have cages, crabs (when applicable) of the right sizes (a very specific range of like, 30-36 mm to make sure it was nice and even), and the cages are in the ground (I had to dig a LOT of holes yesterday), with bamboo. It is done. I am elated but dreading data collection. It'll be a doozy for this one.

The previously mentioned elation, though, is definitely not physical. I'm taking a day off because:

-I just worked a literal full day, after having worked most of this week for most of each day.

-The plots need time to even out anyway so that data isn't weird.

-My hands and arms. They are coated in very fine cuts and holes. I had a crab pinch me hard enough to draw blood yesterday; the hardware cloth and bamboo cut the heck out of my arms; and putting the cages in the ground is a recipe for puncture wounds. The edges of the hardware cloth (it's essentially a mesh) tend to be, well, the edges of a metal mesh. So pushing down on cages to get them into the ground more often than not resulted in a small wire (or a few) of the mesh going into my palm. I am cut straight to heck and back. To those of you prone to worrying (you know who you are) yes I am taking care of my wounds.

-Also digging holes and moving in the marsh for that long is physically exhausting. My everything aches.

But it's a good ache! Because this is what I have to show for it.

12 of these guys (6 with crabs, 6 without) with the cages spread out, like so.

And 12 of these (ditto) with the cages all clumped together.

Now, you might be asking, when is this guy gonna actually explain what this is all about?

Now. So if the science parts of my blog bore you, skip over to the next post which is about last night.

So if y'all will recall, my projects focus around the spatial aspects of the snails' climbing responses to mud crabs. My second project (not this one) is currently focusing on the range of this response, i.e how far out the snails bother reacting, and if it differs between the two crab species. This project, on the other hand, is taking that and applying it to what are called landscape effects. The technical term is "landscape of fear", which is pretty cool if I may say.

So the cages above are in two arrangements - clumped together, and spread apart. The question we're addressing is how these two spatial arrangements effect the snails' perception of this so-called "landscape of fear." In other words, how do the two distributions effect the crabs' spheres of influence and the strength of the effects? When the crabs are spread out, do you see more of this effect over a greater area? Or does a clumped up distribution manage to scare the snails so badly that they climb a lot more in the area it's effecting and just destroy the grass? Are the two areas of effect even comparable?

So it'll be fun. We're gonna look at snail heights and foot down data again, but we're also going to take radulations and maybe put some agar (a type of kelp) down in petri dishes to see how much they eat on the ground vs. the plants. All of this with respect to space, so that we can map out this landscape and how it varies with the two arrangements.

There are some small limits to this study - obviously no crab will stay put 24/7 for 6 weeks in the real world. But it's surprisingly relevant. On mussel mounds (a prominent feature of marshes) you can have quite a few crabs in a small space making their home there, like the clumped arrangement. Everywhere else, they won't be perfectly evenly spread, as with my other treatment, but they will be patchy. And of course as with any research, it has applications to the field in general. Pretty cool stuff.

Status Update

I hate bamboo, and I will never gather it ever again after today if I have my way. Also cages are cool but I thankfully only need to make 10 more.

Plots will be picked out and probably set up tomorrow. Presently I'm exhausted, so, wish me luck. More tomorrow.

The Infinite Business

So I have a list of things about a mile long to get done this week, including but not limited to:

Chopping down another half of a bamboo forest for pipes;
Making sure my gridded quadrat works and is sufficient;
Making about 50 more cages because apparently 4 crabs per plot is lowballing it;
Finding about 18 plots for my experiment;
Maybe getting some agar too for my experiment;
Setting it all up;
Taking data on both it and my current mini project.

So yaaay.

Today I made a gridded quadrat for use with the main experiment. It basically just makes a grid to look at what's where when taking data. Looks something like this:

 

So pretty low tech but still effective, assuming it works out properly. Had to use a dremel to make the holes for the fishing line, which was pretty cool. I like dremels.

Otherwise, I've been putting together materials for the project, and also taking data. Data was alright today, have yet to put it all into the spreadsheets, but I did spot some cool stuff taking it.

Hard to spot, but there is a very skinny spider on the left stake. He'd strung up a web between two of my bamboo posts.

Either a very oddly colored marsh/sand fiddler or a different species. I've yet to ID the guy.

Very upset with me, hence the frothing at the mouth, a classic sign of crab stress.

A Nice, Relaxing Weekend

So, an update. This weekend was nice - too short, but very chill. Got to make cake pops with Jenn and her grandma, do some shopping for necessities (and a few non-necessities, whee buy-2-get-1 at gamestop), eat a whole lot of really good food (I had forgotten what real food tasted like!), and watch the animated version of The Hobbit. Oh yeah and I swam in a pool - something that isn't the ocean for once! So I am nice and recharged and ready for the week.

...Which is good. Because it's going to be a hectic one. One of my trailer-mates is going to be putting her project up, which is going to be involved. Essentially, we'll be setting up 40 large (compared to mine, anyway - really only about half a meter squared) cages by digging up a chunk of the marsh, lining the underlying mud with some mesh to keep stuff from digging in, plopping the marsh back in, putting the cage on top, and filling it up with snails. This may be getting done in a day.

My own main project (pending some details from my adviser tomorrow morning) will also be going up this week, which will be less involved but still quite involved. I'm thinking we'll be setting up my little tube cages with a grid around them (hopefully not more bamboo.. maybe we could even use a gridded quadrat - fancy science speak for a big square used to look at stuff within a set area) in the mud to take positions of where the data is all coming from. Distance stuff, to look at the spatial aspects of my study. So that'll involve finding plots for it, laying all that out (easier than my trailer-mate's project), gathering up 50+ crabs, and trying as well to get that done in a day so that everything starts off at the same time and on a level playing field.

All that for 24 plots or so. Data collection is going to take forever, but it'll be worth it if it pays off. Which it should! Like I said, the initial data from the second mini project is looking pretty good. Some nuances, but they'll average out over time.

But yeah, busy week. And it's been really hot out since the storms passed. So wish me luck, both in getting this all set up, and in not getting a heat stroke! I will keep y'all posted with pictures and day to day descriptions.