Great news: Not a single crab escaped! Success is sweet.

Saturday at noon I began the second attempt at a feeding trial. I monitored the tanks hourly from noon until noon the next day, when I was able to sleep about 8 hours before resuming my crab watching duties. This continued for 72 hours. I spent Tuesday evening and Wednesday sleeping and yesterday preparing the tanks for another round of feeding trails (this next round will be done without monitoring activity levels). The results from the run were significant, but there was a lot of individual variation, so it would be really nice to run again and get the error bars pared down a bit. I hope to throw more in soon, but I went out last night to collect more and only managed to find 7 good gayi (i.e. not missing legs or carrying eggs). The waves were pretty dangerous, especially in the dark, so we finally called it and headed back to the station (Joan was helping me track down the crabs). Stella has 15 I can use, but I really shouldn’t use them unless I can replace them with new crabs…

I’ll probably start at noon today anyways and hope that I can find a way to get her the crabs…