If this is Thursday, then it must be time to go play in the mud!
And that's just what we did. Shortly after breakfast we booted up and strolled down the street, across the road and down onto the Charleston Harbor mudflat. Luckily we had a warm, sunny day, though somehow it feels more appropriate to do this fieldwork when it rains. :-)
Here are is the group, divided into three field teams just getting started. Their task for the day was to collect the data they needed to generate a vertical profile from the water's edge all the way to the high tide line, perhaps 200 meters away.
To do this, they used the same equipment they used to generate the vertical profile along a rock shore, except that when they did that they collected data ever meter along the transect line. But, here they collected data every 10 meters.
Walk, measure, dig, identify, move on...
Here are Victoria and Caleb on the poles, Anne taking notes and Live and Jenn getting ready to play (er collect data) in the mud.
The next team had Sam and Eric on the poles, with Michelle, Ben and Matt getting ready to collect data.
And the last group had Emma and Maddy on the poles, and Hunter, Chey and Collin collecting data.
The students were surprised to find as many cool things as they did living in the mud, including worms, clams and mud shrimp. Plus, at the water's edge there were many juvenile Dungeness crabs and some small flatfish as well. Neat!
It took nearly three hours, but, THEY DID IT! It really was a great day, and an experience the students will not soon forget.
Then, in the afternoon we spent another hour and a half discussing a case study of restoration ecology in the nearby South Slough National Estuary Research Reserve in preparation for our planned visit there the next day.
Thursday evening I met with each research team and we discussed the the feasibility of their plans. Here's what they came up with:
Team 1: Jenn and Hunter - They propose to study the adhesive strength of high intertidal limpets on rocky shores as a strategy for avoiding being swept away by heavy wave action.
Team 2: Liv, Sam and Victoria - they originally planned to do a project involving the top predator sea star Pisaster, but since those sea stars are still recovering from the recent sea star wasting disease epidemic that hit the entire west coast a few years ago, they switched to doing a research project using juvenile Dungeness crabs to test their substrate preferences.
Team 3: Emma and Maddy - These two are going to do a population demographics study on the black turban snail, Tegula funebralis. They plan to collect data on their size and age between different locations.
Team 4: Michelle and Caleb - This team originally wanted to test adhesive power of the chiton Mopalis muscosa, but since switched to a population demographics study examining individual size by location.
Team 5: Collin and Chey - This team plans to do a variant on a study done in Great Britain testing the effects of a chemical on the feeding response time of the sea anemone Anthopleura elegentassima. They are still working out the details, but they are leaning toward looking at the effects of sunscreen on these animals.
Team 6: Eric and Matt - This team is going to look at the inter-clonal fighting responses of the sea anemone Anthopleura elegantissima. Sort of a gladiator wars study.
Team 7: Anne and Ben - This team proposed to do a descriptive developmental biology study examining the timing of development of embryos of the high intertidal limpet Lottia digitalis. That is, if they can get them to spawn. We all have our fingers crossed.
