Alright! I’m back. Actually, I’ve been here for some time, but updates get shoved to a back burner when I get distracted by more pressing matters. Let me explain what has happened with my research:

We placed artificial turf plates with the 25 evenly spaced mussels and a tethered crab outside, to see if natural mortality would affect the trend we saw in the lab (that they eat a lot more in short turf). We left them out for a few days, and many of the crabs were lost. Excitingly, with an n=6 for treatments and n=3 for controls (18 plates total – 9 of each turf type) we still found significant results! Since this was just a trial run I was quite surprised. Of course, this meant repetition should be done, but on a larger scale – since the two trials can’t be combined (pseudoreplication and all that jazz). More plates = construction of new long turf plates, cleaning off short turf plates (we ran out of resin which is only available in Santiago), tethering lots of crabs, picking out mussels between 0.6 and 1.0 cm, collecting all those crabs and mussels, and waiting for the mussels to attach.

We also had a highschool intern for a couple of weeks during his winter break.  It was neat to work with someone young and excited about marine biology, and to have help with some of the not-so-fun parts of preparing experiments.

I’ve also been preparing for the next round of lab experiments with clumped mussels. It’s coming down to the wire since I only effectively have until the 3rd and we’re spending the week before that at a site down south to check out long turf and tag crabs (part of Evie’s many projects). I’m really excited to see long turf in action and very disappointed that it is almost time to head home.

Due to the latter I have been working for awhile now developing a Fulbright proposal to do with the station

So, I prepared 36 plates to use for this round. We set them out yesterday (4 hours, most of which were dark and very, very cold) which is exciting. Even complaining about the weather, it’s really fun to work in the field here. We saw an eel!!! It was only about a foot from either of us in the water between a two rock outcroppings. It made working hard at night well worth the trouble. Now I just need a good fish guide for Chile…

The plates are in and I am off. I haven’t traveled in awhile, so Evie suggested a trip south to a nice hostel in an area with great hiking and hotsprings. Having the latter is very important since I could be rained in and miserably cold. We’ll see. Anyways, I’ll be on an overnight bus tomorrow and back either here on Monday, or in Santiago on Tuesday for the ECIM ski trip Wednesday. So much to do! The tanks for the lab experiment with clumped mussels are ready to go, I just need to find a few days in a row free and dump the crabs in (I won’t be monitoring hourly activity levels).

So that doesn’t nearly cover everything that has happened since my last post, but hopefully it allays fears that I have fallen off of the planet or forgotten that I even have a blog…

Photos!  Note: Evie (my mentor) is the woman who is not me and Diego is the highschool intern I mentioned above.