Week 13

A week of good low tides, and so I got to do some of my own reef surveys. Weeks of setting things up, learning new techniques, learning to identify species, observing Erin doing exactly this, and practising have finally paid off. Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday saw me at my three differnt positons in the Tapuae Marine Reserve conducting my transects. At each site I carried out three 50m transects. Each had 10 quadrats, 2 within each 10m section. Using my own data collection sheet I looked at the substrate, the seaweeds, colonies of species and what other species I found in each square 1/4m. The data is now ready to be entered into my Excel sheets. It felt really good to be actually carrying out after getting everything set up.
I haven't entered the data into Excel yet but my observations tell me each of the three sites are quite different. One had a  lot of large rock crabs, and I could hear them scuttle away as I walked over the rocks. One transect had lots of sandy tube worms, and another a lot of cats eyes. I am looking forward to getting it all entered to see exactly what I found.
I also spent time behind the microscope, looking for my species in soft sediment samples. I also met with Elise and talked about designing a brief for some on-line data collection. This sounds exciting and I have spent a lot of thinking time on this so far.

I spent a fair bit of time on the laptop as well putting together the videos from the Penguin Experience II camp. They aren't available to be published yet so here is a little video about some of the crabs I saw. It is not as scary as it seems.