6/12-6/18

I started my week on Tuesday helping one of the PhD students with one of his projects. We started by finishing building his lift nets, and then we went out at low tide to place them with kayaks. We also collected snails for one of my projects with Emlyn while we were out in the marsh. Next, we went out to Dain Creek and I helped him complete a monthly survey of 8 plots of Spartina. We collected data on the amount of shoots, crab burrows, snails, and heights of 10 random shoots in specific quadrats. While out there, I saw several bottle nose dolphins swimming in the creek (huge). After that, we went back out to pull the lift nets to complete a random sample of what was in the water in these 1 meter by 1 meter squares. We caught a bunch of grass shrimp and one toad frog. I also went to check on the snails we had collected earlier that day and had discovered they had staged a coup. Even though I respected their escape attempt I did eventually manage to get them all back into their tanks.

On Wednesday, I met Shelby with her UGA advisor Jeb (derogatory) and the two PhD students I have been working with off the island. Shelby and Jeb had been completing an annual oyster reef survey from reefs all along the coast of Georgia. We helped them collect oysters from the final 6 sites near Darien, Georgia. We went out in one of their lab's boats, launching from a DNR headquarters. At each site, we collected a 0.25 square meter quadrat of oysters. We also collected a piece of rebar from each site that had been placed a year prior to examine oyster recruitment and growth. As well as this, we also measured the salinity, Dissolved Oxygen, and temperature of the water at each site. However, while out collecting oysters we noticed the dark clouds on the horizon were getting closer. Jeb didn't seem to think this was an issue for us, so we continued on. Right before we reached our 4th site the heavens opened and drenched all of us as well as all of our equipment. With lighting in the area we decided to pull off to the side of the marsh and sat on an oyster reef to wait out the storm. Spirits high, we quickly finished the rest of the sites and headed back to the DNR. After processing the oysters, by sperating 50 oysters into singletons from each site, we finally were able to get into dry clothes. Despite almost getting smited by lighting it was a fun day out in the field. 

On Thursday, I started my day by helping another undergrad working on her senior thesis. She's investigating what mangrove crabs are eating on Sapelo, since their native range is much farther south. After helping her scout out sites and identify crabs I met with Shelby and Emlyn. I then gathered a bunch of soupy mud from one of the boat docks and put them into shallow dishes to begin our lab snail consumption experiments. We hope to be able to grow benthic algae in the dishes and test how much infected vs uninfected snails are eating. I then set up the escapee snails to be shed to determine their infection prevalence.  

On Friday, I looked at the shedded (shed?) snails I had collected under the dissecting microscope to determine if there were any cercaria in each of the snails' well plates. If there were cercaria present I would use a micropipette to transfer the parasite onto a slide to look at it under the compound microscope. After doing this, I then identified what species each parasite was and recorded the data. After going through all 296 snails, only 17 were infected. I released all the uninfected snails back into le wild and kept the infected ones to use for our consumption experiment (subject to release at a further date). While looking at the snails, I also started to create some of the tethers I will be using for future predation assays. Somehow it took me the whole day to do all of this so I was able to go home not covered in mud for once. 

On Sunday (working on the weekend>>) I just finished up making the squid pops so we would be ready to go on Monday for our first predation assay. Pretty chill stuff, but it did take me like 2 hours.