the third candidate

I saw this bumper sticker in Glendale. Made me laugh outloud.

My brother added "Finally, a president we can trust, and one who can tell the difference between a moon and a space station from relatively far away".  

How it looks

Field nights have been busy for me lately. Wednesday, we marked about 200 flies, and last night we marked about 90. There were only 6 returners, and the low numbers were a little surprising, but I'm going out for the next several nights in a row, so I'm sure I'll get good numbers. 

I did talk to a few Big Losers. They were taking a walk down to Mulholland highway and back up to the mansion. One couple asked me what I was up to. I said "Field work", what are you studying? "Well, I'm looking at this fly that parasitizes a cricket (laugh)", OHohh (in the tone of "that's nice, c'mon honey, let's get out of here").  So I'm basically famous now.

Anyway, here's a video of the flies responding to my recorded cricket song. They're pretty tenacious. 

a flat

I had a flat tire the other day. It is times like these that I am so grateful for the way my dad raised me. Before I was allowed to get my driver's license, he insisted on teaching me a)how an engine works and b)how to change a flat tire. Of course, I thought he was the meanest dad on earth and clearly he hated me terribly to put me through such stupid hoops. I remember sitting at the dining room table as he sketched out the engine and explained it to me (it was actually pretty cool) and the repeated practices of changing tires.

Well, it's all more than paid off. When I take my car in (more specifically, when I used to take my sad volvo in), I can talk at least a little bit intelligently with the mechanics, which gains me some respect. And half the time I don't need to take it in because I can figure out pretty much what's going on (sometimes with a call to dad) and deal with it myself. I also have the confidence to learn about the problems that my dad's lessons didn't teach me, because I know the basics.

As for the flat tire business, I think this is one of the most important skills every driver and non-driver should learn. That and how to use jumper cables (also taught to me by my dad). Do you know how to change your tire? It's not that hard, but you have to know how to do it. Especially because when you get a flat, it's not in a situation where you're able to figure it out so well.

I moved down here to Southern California 3 years ago. I got a flat tire on my first day of work, halfway there. That sucked. But I sucked it up and made my dad proud. I pulled off the freeway into a parking lot and changed my tire in 6 minutes. While I was at it, some guy came up to me and offered to help. I can't tell you the pride I felt as I said "No thanks, I got it". I got to work on time and without a mark on my outfit. My hands were filthy, so I asked where the bathroom was and added that, ugh, I got a flat on my way to work and had to change it. Yeah, I was bragging. 

Anyway, I was thinking about all this a few days ago while I was changing my tire and thought I'd write about it. Everyone should know how to change a tire. 

mark and recapture

I have 2 fabulous research assistants, Nancy and Andrew. I simply wouldn't be able to do my work if I didn't have their help. And they're fun to be with, so I'm pretty lucky. I should also mention that they often bring their sig-Os, Angel and Jessica (respectively), and I appreciate their willingness to help when they get nothing for it. 

Anyway, Andrew took a bunch of pictures the first night we marked. They're pretty cool.

Here's a coyote running across our field just as we arrived. We see its poop a lot.

No caption necessary. We see at least 20 of these ladies each night.

Alright, here's me getting the flies out of the trap. I use a plastic vial to take out a few at a time, because there are so many of them now that it's not possible to count them while they're all in the trap. I have to have one person watch for escapees while I'm in there. 

Once I've got the vial full of flies, I stick it into a cooler full of crushed ice. Since flies are exothermic, cooling them down is like anesthetic. But I have to be careful not to cool them for too long, because it would kill them (by slowing down their metabolic processes so far that they stop). 

Here I am marking the flies on their wings with sharpie. 

These flies are not afraid of humans. Not much is known about them, but the only predators I can think of for them are bats, so they have no genes for being nervous around big mammals. Here is a fly that I've just marked standing on the tip of my pen. This isn't uncommon, it's kind of a hassle. But cute:)

This is the "recovery room". After the flies are marked, someone drops them here so we can see if they recover. It's pretty important in a mark-and-recapture project that the marking process doesn't kill the organism. I would say it's imperative...

So there you go (Erin:), it's like you're almost there. I wish I could have all of my friends and family come and do this with me. It's a pretty cool experience and I would love to share it with all of you. 

not much, a lot.

I haven't posted in a while, partly because not much postworthy has been going on with me, and partly because school started and my fieldwork kicked into high gear. For the record, I'm getting TONS of flies and the cricket population is declining rapidly. It's as we expected, just not so quick! Here's a graph of my censusing:

As you may know or remember, or not, I'm studying a fly that parasitizes crickets. This means that when my fly is pregnant (we call it "gravid" in insects), she flies around listening for chirping crickets. As an important side note, only male crickets call, and they call to attract female crickets. So when my gravid fly finds a chirping cricket, she drops one of her little maggot babies onto the unfortunate cricket. The maggot baby then digs into its host and spends the next 8-10 days consuming the cricket's insides. This makes for a sad cricket and he stops calling pretty soon after the maggot finds him, which means that the female crickets can't find the males anymore, which means the cricket population starts to crash. So as the fly population increases and larvae depositing becomes a popular trend, the cricket population starts crashing because sex suddenly isn't so popular (because the female crickets can't locate any male crickets). Then, because there is justice, as the cricket population crashes, the gravid flies have a harder time locating hosts, so the fly population crashes.

This has not been formally shown (the fly is uninteresting to most biologists and has been largely neglected as a study subject ecologically), so my nights out counting flies and crickets is doing that. My graph looks pretty good so far. Though I'm very nervous because this censusing business is only the smallest aspect of my study and, as my advisor Dave stated, "A cricket and fly census does not a thesis make". So I am also marking captured flies and then releasing them with the hopes of attracting them with a different fly song (long story, boring too, maybe another time when I have nothing to post). So last Friday, my excellent assistants (and their girlfriends and boyfriends) and I marked all of our trapped flies with sharpie on their wings. 3 nights later, last Monday, we trapped again and had NO recaptures. That sort of sucks. I don't know if there were really no returnees, or if the sharpie wore off. We marked some flies in the lab and after 4 days I couldn't see any marking at all. Who'd have guessed that sharpie isn't so permanent after all?

To add a little pressure, I expect the fly population to crash any day now, and I have to wait until next week for an additional fly trap to come back from Utah before I can try an official mark and recapture (I need 2 traps to do it correctly). So I'm a little nervous.  Dave's words ring in my head like an ominous warning: "A cricket and fly census does not a thesis make". Jesse and I are in a big hurry to get back up to Seattle permanently, so I need to get all of my data this field season, and it's happening so fast that I'm worried it will be inadequate. 

So that's what's been keeping me busy. That and Biometry class (statistics for biology). 

At least that's it. I could be complaining about having to drive to Arizona and Utah for my fieldwork like my labmate, and I could be complaining about having to work part-time during all of this like a lot of grad students (thank you for supporting us, Jesse). And I could be complaining about having to collecting cat poop and being stuck in the lab doing DNA sequences like my other labmate. I'm pretty lucky overall. 

So why am I always complaining?

I love life.