Today we started our independent research projects. I have decided to study flamingo tongue snails and their relationship to the common sea fan. On the reef there are many of these mutualistic relationships and I wanted to conduct something that is abundant to assure the most challenging aspect is not finding the species. I am looking at how much the snail eats in area per day per centimeter of snail. The feeding trail of the snail can be seen as the coloration is distinct on the sea fan. I am going to try and use a computer program to find the are of the spot eaten, as Professor Gilchrist told me about it. The only problem is she forgot the name of the program. I am going to spend some time poking around the internet later to figure out a program that will work, at least I know there is one out there.
In the field, I went and marked 10 different fans I will look at everyday. That way I can track the change per day and find and average for each snail. It was a lot harder than I thought to physically place the flags. Originally, I was going to do half of my flags deep and half shallow but I quickly learned shoving a flag into the sand/rock was hard enough in shallow water. I used a combination of different rocks and things to keep the flags to stay put. We will see if I was successful tomorrow...
The snails stay for a while, and if one moves one day I can choose another one and just go with the numbers I already have for a data point. With that said, I am prepared to change my question and direction of my project based on what I see in the field, as I think that is a big learning objective of field study it self. I am very excited to get to do something hands on and real and completely led by my own decisions.
Tomorrow's plan is to start taking pictures to be analyzed as well as measure each snail.
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