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!
No comments:
Post a Comment