More Surveys

So yesterday I took rads on die-off and some other minor data. The rads came out a bit weird; I think the snails had been climbing on the cages themselves a bit too much, so our natural (no cage) plots actually had more damage than those. The no crab cages were still less than the crab cages, though, so it worked, but not perfectly. That's all okay though because it's still okay data, and our St. Simons project is basically doing all this stuff over just more elegantly. Was a relatively slow day, though.

Today on the other hand was too fast. I took Dispersion out of the marsh, which meant removing all the cages and bamboo and stuff and freeing the crabs. That took a bit. Then I took my second survey, looking at the area of effect that the crabs have in short vs. intermediate Spartina areas. The data looks okay but the densities are really, really low. We'll see what my advisor says. Tomorrow I do the same thing for mussels vs. short grass.

That data should be more interesting - lots of crabs on the mussel mounds, usually. We'll see. In the meantime, have some pictures.

 

Starting to feel really weird about my imminent departure from the island. It's weird to leave behind a place that's been such an integral part of the past few months. Not to say that I don't miss being in Tallahassee, of course, it's just... weird. Not really sure what to make of it, at the moment.