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.