Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Day 4: Tuesday


Today was a super productive day! The first thing we did was head out to the mangroves to finish up doing transects. This took almost all of the morning since we completed a bunch of them. We also spent some time taking cross-section pictures of the mangroves to help with identifying the species later on. After spending all morning snorkeling in the sun, we spent the afternoon working in the lab. We split up into groups to work on different things. One group worked on the crab orientation experiments in the basement of the lab, while another group measured the sea grass samples from the mangrove transects. We also had a group place buckets into the sand on a local beach for a crab feeding experiment (more details to come). My group got to work with the crab orientation experiments. We were looking at the crab's response to the 40 degree angle target. One person sat under the table to watch the angle at which the orientate while another person recorded and still another person got the lucky job of placing the crabs in the bucket. Sarah Norman was the lucky person the first trial. It was hilarious to watch her talking to the crabs and getting them into the bucket. She would often yell out "I'm a tree, I'm a tree" as a coping method for dealing with the crabby things. The last thing she wanted to do was get pinched. haha
After dinner we went out to the beach to add bait to the crab experiment. 18 buckets were buried in the sand and baited with fish (4 were used as controls and had no bait). This way the crabs would come near to the bucket and fall in trying to get the bait. In the morning, we will go out to the traps and see the amount and types of crabs we caught. =)
AS for now, I am going to keep uploading pictures so you all can see how much fun we are having!!

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