Projects galore

I guess I should tell you first about the second faculty led project I participated in, which involved some flashbacks to this past summer with the Echinacea project in Minnesota. Kathleen Kay, a pollination and evolutionary biologist from UC Santa Cruz (who also, crazily enough, has a friend of Hart's and mine from Grinnell working as a lab assistant right now), set up a project for us involving observing the effects of floral display (like petals) and pollinator reward (in this case pollen) on pollinator visitation rates at a flowering vine. The project was actually originally supposed to be studying the effects on pollinators of a florivorous carpenter bee that is supposed to cut windows out of the flowers to get some nectar from the flower, while not even pollinating the flowers. However, in the first day students went out there, nobody was able to see the carpenters florivorifying the vine, so we were forced to change our objectives a bit. So goes science.

A lot of the students really disliked sitting for several hours observing flowers and recording pollinator visits, but I have experience with tolerating the tedium, and actually enjoyed the day. I do like flowers, and the systems involved, in which one organism is utterly reliant upon another for sexual reproduction, which is equivalent to your very existence on an evolutionary timescale, are fascinating.

And now, we're planning out our first independent projects, for which we have been allotted four days of data collection, beginning the day after tomorrow. I began considering a project relating to scorpions, either in their cannibalistic behavior or in the microclimates surrounding their refuges. But that idea sort of faded, and I began working with a couple other guys to develop some ideas. They originally were aiming for a crocodile project, probably involving playing recorded sounds in the marsh and gauging croc reactions. But that wasn't really feasible/interesting, and we hit upon a project with anoles (small lizards) abundant in this area. We wanted to measure the density of anoles in relation to the trails and roads, to examine the edge effects created by such paths. This seemed promising, but we actually switched one more time! I think the anole project would've been difficult to work out anyways, because we had to visually sample the anole density, and somehow eliminate the bias created by increased visibility on a trail or road because of less litter cover and other cover.

Our final idea is actually building upon the pollinator behavior ideas we began with the faculty led project. Now, we're testing the effects of flower height and local flower density on the pollinator visitation rates on the same flowering vine. Should work well. Alright, I need to go work on our presentation of the project idea. See you all later.