All settled into the house now and have a much better idea of what we'll be doing. The other girls and I were a bit puzzled as to our daily activities but we're getting the hang of it now.
On Tuesday we met with MJ in the morning to go to two of the sites we'll be surveying in Pleasant Bay. One was Erica's Beach, which is a little beach owned by a sweet old lady who's a horseshoe crab enthusiast. She does surveys during the day so we'll only be doing the night surveys at that beach. MJ taught us how to count the crabs in 5m quadrants. I'll post pictures of this when we go out and actually do a spawning survey.
The next survey site we went to was a salt marsh in Nauset Bay. MJ showed us the start and end points of the area we'll be surveying. After that we went to the BioLab to see where to wash the park service vehicle off and where we would later be measuring egg densities.
On Thursday we learned how to actually tag the crabs. What we do is spray the area with alcohol, dip a drill bit into iodine and then drill a small hole in the left posterior point of the prosoma. Then the little circular tag just snaps into that hole. We record tag number, sex, and size of the crab at the widest point of the prosoma. We did our tagging at Marsh 2/3, which was a very mucky area and required hip waders. This is a spawning survey site that we can only do during the day because it floods too much at the night high tide.
Our last survey site is an island that we'll have to get to by boat. So, we do our surveys at the high tides on the full and new moons throughout May and June. In July we'll be measuring egg densities. When we're not doing spawning surveys we'll be tagging the crabs as much as possible.
Alright, that's it for now. I keep forgetting to charge my camera battery so I'll post pictures as soon as I take my camera out in the field with me.
I'm in Connecticut for the weekend with Mike so that's all until Sunday! :)
