Return

Back on the island. It's quite rainy and gross. On the upside I am refreshed and recharged and ready to get back to work!

On a quick side-note, I practically ran over a turtle on my way down here, by the docks! I hopped out and helped him across the road though. We're pretty sure he's a diamondback terrapin. Cool little guy, and a nice way to resume my internship.

I'm making a note here: Huge success!

The crab cages worked! Was busy yesterday (we went out to dinner as a lab group at a pizza joint in Brunswick) and didn't get to check in til today but all 3 crabs are confined and alive and kicking.

Will check back in on them again on Monday, in the meantime I'm headed back to Tallahassee for a weekend of fun and relaxation off island. See y'all then!

Hail; also Cage + Crab = ???

I apologize for the lack of post yesterday, couldn't make it down to the Institute to make a proper post. I do, however, have some cool stuff to share.

So yesterday's main job apart from a bit of reading for my project was to take salinity well data for a few marsh sites. This is more along the lines of the rain-outs I mentioned early on - research looking into whether the mussel mounds actually have any effect on the salinity of the water around them, and if that helps the grasses out during drought years.

The wells themselves are small PVC pipes perforated to allow water in, and then capped to keep the tides out. In order to take a reading, you use a pump and a fancy piece of equipment called a refractometer to measure the salt concentration. So we did this for a bunch of sites in Lighthouse, looking at different salinities at different areas. Haven't had a chance to look at the data so don't ask me specifics on any findings.

About halfway through this process, though, the weather took a turn for the worse. Initially we soldiered on and only got rained on a bit, managing to blast through all of Lighthouse, but as we made it into Oakdale, the lightning was coming on hard and fast enough to spook us back. We get into the mule (it's basically a rugged golf cart and our transportation mainstay), and one of the grad students has texted us essentially telling us to get the heck back home. So we do. Just in time to miss penny-sized hail. Craziness!

The sad part is that the storm was bad enough to wreck our rain-outs. Those're getting fixed to some extent, but we're trying a mesocosm (bucket) experiment to do the same sort of thing off the field. Today we gathered mussels to that goal. Doing so basically involved shoveling a chunk out of the marsh with a mussel mound in it and lugging it off the marsh. Fun stuff.

But the exciting part.

And oh is it exciting.

My main project for today was prototyping crab cages for my experiment. I'll detail my stuff in a later post - not sure how secretive I need to be, not to mention it's still in the works. The design is pretty brilliant - kind of like a crazy, hardware cloth (mesh) tube just big enough to get shoved into the marsh with a single crab and some snails for it to munch on and enough space to burrow.

Much too big!

Looking better..

One in the ground, with crabby inside.

And a different one, with dead oyster shell piled up around it to keep him nice and cooled off through the blistering heat of low tide.

This is more of the crazy, cool, DIY side of doing ecology. I designed them myself with a little guidance, and then I  ended up making like, 6 or 7 of these guys from scratch and scrap material today. It was kind of a Goldilocks experience. The first one (first picture above) was far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far too big (my adviser's words, not mine). The next few (I thought) would be too small, but they're the ones we ended up deploying. They may be just right.

But, my job tomorrow is to check in and make sure nobody's dead, that they can feed in there on the snails we gave them, etc. Oh, and that nobody escaped. Because despite the fact that I used like, 30 cable ties to hold the mesh together, these are essentially Houdini's crustacean counterparts. But with any luck this'll work and I'll be on my way to an excellent research project.

Another Quick Post

Yeah once again not much going on today. We finished cleaning up the project mentioned last post, took salinity data for the drought project, and put the rain-outs on just in time for it to pour down rain. I also sat down and started working out the setup for my project. A few kinks to work out in the plan, but I'll be talking to my adviser soon to get stuff figured out and hopefully have a finalized proposal ready by the weekend so we can get to work on it.

2 random thoughts. Firstly, I bloody hate ticks. There are a lot of insects out here, and I've already pulled 5 off myself total. Luckily only 2 had bitten. Fingers crossed, they hadn't been there long. Reaaaally don't want to deal with any nastiness that those guys carry.

Secondly, remember how I mentioned the fiddlers? I had the craziest thought today. I was walking through the marsh to one of our sites, and as anyone cuts through the marsh it's essentially like parting the Red Sea, except with fiddlers. They're very visual little guys, so any big, moving target sends them scuttling away quickly. But today was different. Because sitting in my path was this tiny, bold little crab,  claw raised defiantly, like so:

Coincidentally, not this guy specifically. This is actually a sand fiddler (Uca pugilator), spotted on a hike at Honeymoon Island, near Palm Harbor. The guy in my anecdote is a mud fiddler (Uca pugnax)

And the image that immediately popped into my head? A classical, iron-clad knight of old, shield raised and ready to go up against a massive, fire-breathing dragon. And I kinda had to laugh a bit.

Aluminum Flashing is the Worst Material In the World

Seriously. Today was probably the most work intensive day I've had on the island, so this post is going to be a short one. All we really did today was break down an old experiment featuring lots and lots of pens. Each pen was set up as a square, with aluminum flashing as the sides and a 2x4 at each corner. Breaking it down required pulling it out of a foot of marsh mud by the 2x4. Basically had to wiggle each corner loose.

It didn't come out super cleanly, though, and the flashing is super sharp, so myself and my 3 undergrad comrades (one of whom sadly had to leave today, but she's getting to go down to another UF research site) are basically coated in tiny, super fine but shallow micro-cuts from handling the stuff.

And then it was all marched across the marsh for about 1/4 of a mile to the truck. For 60+ cages. In the heat, and the movement hindering muck.

Oof. I am sore in many, many places, and quite tired, but it's a good tired. At least we got it (mostly) done. Still more to do tomorrow though. And I need to think more on my own project, which I'm supposed to have mostly figured out by the end of the week. Very busy, but it's still been a great summer so far. Just need to figure out how to get myself to Jenn for a bit, or vice versa. I misses her.

Sidenote, they may be obnoxiously common,

Each of those specks is a crab.

but I still absolutely adore the fiddler crabs around here.

Lazy Saturday

So today was a very mellow day. Not much got done. We took salinity data and messed with the rain-outs (from day 1) a bit to make sure all was well. The grad students were all gone off island, so it was kind of a lazy day.

There was some minor cleanup, and some wandering about and hanging out and data collecting, but the highlight of the day was a minor hike through a trail that ends with Nanny Goat Beach. You end up getting taken through like, four or five different types of ecosystems. You start out in like, a wetland forest area, moving onto a path through the salt marsh, into the traditional scrub forests I'm used to from Florida, to dunes, and finally onto the beach.

Lots of coolness. There were a handful of Armases, close cousins of the previously mentioned Sesarma, which were promptly wrangled.

 

And then released, gently.

 

 Lots of bugs. Only the pretty kind get pictures in my blog though. Seriously though the mosquitos were swarming.

 

Some cool possibly invasive plants.

 

I saw (but couldn't photograph) a ground skink, and there are signs for diamondback rattlers, which we luckily saw none of. Although it'd be kinda cool just to catch a glimpse of one from a very safe distance. Lastly and possibly coolest, we found not one but three small sharks (probably dogfish) washed up on Nanny Goat.

 

Took a swim afterwards and am now chilling at the institute. The swim was somewhat unremarkable but did have a curious encounter. One of the other undergrads picked up a hermit and he responded by promptly unseating himself from his shell. Very weird! We managed to coax him back in by filling up the palm of my hand with water, because apparently he was too over-encumbered in dry air to maneuver himself and the shell into position. If you've never seen a hermit unseated from his shell, it's a really weird lesson in their morphology. Seriously cool stuff. I unfortunately got no pictures of that process.

So here is another shark.

Unfortunately, it's back to work breaking down the enclosures tomorrow, which means more working with flashing (as mentioned last post). Arg. I have some tiny, very thin cuts on my arm from that stuff. It's really a pain, but I'll enjoy a chance to get back out into the marshes, at least. I like feeling helpful to the lab group, too.

By the by, high res pictures of just about everything I post here are also available on my Flickr, I just like to break my narrative up with eye candy.

Crab Wrangling

Today was likely the chillest day I've had on the island so far. Literally all we did was wander out into the marsh and think more, make some more observations, and get a lesson on proper crab handling; the afternoon was a minor bit of cleanup for a past experiment followed by massive chill time with movies and Nanny Goat Beach (yes, that's the real name).

Because I have no pictures of the actual wrangling or work or movies, gonna just toss up some unrelated Nanny Goat shots.

But back to wrangling. This is by far the most bizarrely entertaining aspect of the marshes. Essentially, you find a burrow that looks like it'd house a mud crab and shove a PVC pipe into the marsh beside the burrow. This usually causes some of the water in the burrow to surge out and usually spooks the crab out in the process. Then, you quickly swipe the crab away from the burrow to prevent escape, and then one of two things happens.

The crab comes quietly, or you have to deal with an angry devil of a crab with both claws skyward, at you. Picking the crab itself up requires dodging claws and either grabbing them by the outside of their claws, holding them inward to immobilize the bugger, or grabbing them directly by the arms themselves. Either result is challenging. I had a white claw grab me full on by my fingernail (along it, not on the edge) today and pinch hard. I wish I had pictures of this process. The end result is an immobile crab that can then be measured (although this requires tricky maneuvering), examined to determine gender, or used for experiments. Or all three.

It is a rewarding process, though, and quite fun.

As I said earlier, though, the afternoon was mostly just the tiniest bit of mess cleanup from a past experiment. Being a field experiment, though, breaking it down means contending with mud, and flashing, a commonly used material for cages that's basically aluminum sheets used to box things in, is the worst thing ever to work with. The edges are extremely sharp, and lugging it across the marsh is taxing. Still managed to get a bit done, though.

Nanny Goat was a nice break in the evening. We got there just in time for sunset (which unfortunately wasn't out over the ocean, this being the Atlantic and facing east and whatnot) but was still really cool and chill. There was a storm coming in over the mainland that was booming in the distance, and the moon was stunning. This island is a truly beautiful place. I'm really digging the camaraderie too - my roommates and postdoc adviser have proven invaluable at both bouncing research ideas off and just generally goofing off with. The latter half of that has been awesome because I think I may be closing in on a plausible, cool research project, to be detailed in a later post. 

It's been great so far, though, and it's a fun group to be a part of. And it's only day 3. Crazy!