Today kicked off quite an adventurous week of work activities. I arrived at 8am prepared for a full day of work. Yesterday MJ and I had finally gotten all of his tanks (minus a few malfunctions) prepared for experiment. After quick fix its involving tying seaweed to rocks, we left with all the crabs, shrimp, and fish in place. Oh and yesterday I got to spread oyster larvae into tanks where they are being raised. So cool.
Upon arrival this morning…..disaster. 3 crabs were missing, 2 were in different tanks than they had started, the shrimp were eaten, and the putty sealant was chopped up. CRABS you didn’t!!!!!!! What a nuisance. They were little terrorists to our project. Turns out one crab was buried in the rocks, one was hanging out in the water table, but there is still one missing. Oops. MJ’s experiment is off to a great start.
Leaving him to rethink his project, I went off to learn how to drive a 4x4 truck! What a way to start my truck experience. It was a Silverado and man I felt like I was riding on top of the world. The man testing me out is a jokester from Harker’s Island (which means he has a crazy irish/Australian accent even though he is American). He took me out to an island and instructed me to “just drive into that patch of sand at full speed and then slam on the breaks.” DO what!! Well I sufficiently got stuck in the sand. Enter: 4 gear driving. Switch to 4 wheel drive, hit the gas, and bam! Your driving again. Then I had to drive in a circle through the deep sand without getting stuck. Some machine I tell you. Now I know why guys love big trucks. I felt like I could drive through anything. Sweet!
Meanwhile, MJ had resorted to sticking with behavioral observations. As his assistant I was in charge of timing and writing down his observations. Catch is, we were observing an amphipod which is maybe 0.5cm long and blends in with the tank. Well that was interesting. We probably lost 5 in the process.
13:00 – the hour has come. Marsh adventures begin. We left the lab with 6 people headed to Pine Knoll Shores. We had 2 sites to work on this afternoon. Both are residential backyards on the sound: one with a new sill in place, the other a natural site. Our job was to put all the equipment at each site, set up the fyke net poles, set fiddler crab traps, and seine. All went well until our oxygen bubblers quit working and the scales malfunctioned. Executive decision: bring all the species back to the lab. Well, without the bubblers most of the fish died. Terrible! My mummichogs were resilient fighters though! Not so much for the poor brown shrimp. They were HUGE!!! Like 7cm.
17:00 normal time to get
off work. False. We just arrived back at the lab and had to start sorting, weighing, and measuring all the fish. Stay patient.
18:30 finally done. One hour off for dinner. I went with the 2 grad students to wendy’s. Mistake. They were having an even worse afternoon than we had. Literally they could not get a single order correct. We were there 30 minutes before we got food. Incompetent people. And my sandwich was missing its lettuce. All I could do was laugh.
19:30 headed back to our two sites. Set up the fyke nets because its now high tide. Drastic tidal difference!
20:30 finally driving back home…….bedtime
2:30am alarm goes off. Up! Banana, bathing suit, ipod, booties. Drive back to the same site. Time for the nets to come back in because its now low tide. Awesome decision to take ALL the species back for measurements. Originally we were going to do it all in the field. Rachel finally realized how crazy that was going to be. So we will be counting tomorrow. For now we just collected the nets, put all the creatures in containers, and done.
4:00 BED again.
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