This past weekend consisted of roughly 12 hours being spent in the library on Saturday working on Calculus 2. Riveting, I know. Sunday was a more interesting day, however, starting off with Colleen and I attending one of Sylvia Yamada’s talks on European Green Crabs. This was a treat, as Sylvia is an expert on the organisms. She was here at OIMB to give a talk to the marine bioinvasions course taught by Jim Carlton, another superstar in the marine invasives world. She took the class out to show them the trapping process, and allowed me and Colleen to take back the crabs to measure for the regular South Slough monitory data collection. I learned a lot from her in such a short time. The rest of the day consisted of more math work. Volleyball with a lot of the OIMB students and some of the other interns has been another very welcomed way to pass time. Out of every sport to play recreationally, volleyball has got to be my third favorite (wrestling and racquetball are one and two, respectively). Over the week, the trials of my study have begun! The results have not necessarily been what I was hoping to see, but that is not what science is about. I did ten trials, and found that the crab went into the LED lit trap three times, went into the dark trap twice, and simply stayed inside of the tub five times. I was hoping to find overwhelming evidence of attraction to light, but no such luck. I will continue some more testing to see if the crabs are behaving as expected within the experimental setup, however, to validate the results of this testing. I will use the same setup, but this time will be using bait in one trap, and nothing in the other, akin to the light setup I previously described. We can safely assume that a crab will go towards the bait versus no bait when given an option, so if we see this, then we know the design apparatus is not an issue and that the crabs simply seem to not be attracted to the light! Thursday went nothing like I had imagined it would. Colleen and I had to walk up the street to Chuck’s Seafood, where we typically grab the tuna offcuts that we use as bait for the green crab trapping. Usually, the workers put the offcuts to the side for us over the hours they work throughout the day. Today, however, Colleen and I were left to our own devices, and were dug through a container of dead tuna, removing the guts and skin of the fish with our hands. Gnarly. On the bright side, Richard taught us about some gelatinous blobs that we found growing on some green crabs. What we initially thought were some weird growths, turned out to be a genus of bryozoan called Alcyonidium! It’s fascinating how much people, like Richard, know about biodiversity to be able to identify something so small, so fast.
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AuthorHey! I'm Sebastian Velazquez, a Biology (Ecology) student from Spring City, Pennsylvania. I am spending the summer studying invasive European Green Crabs under the guidance of Shon Schooler. Archives
August 2022
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