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.