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.