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Place your bets: who will be eaten first?

Another day is rising over the gorgeous bay of Tjärnö.

Breakfast view is really nice and motivating for a working day… 

Well okay, so now the time for fun, leisure and happiness of being reunited with our friends has passed. Now it is work time. After brainstorms and plenty of changes (we couldn’t count how many times we changed our minds), we finally decided on a plan for our experiment! The pilot studies were run because we wanted to test all the equipment that we had built, make sure our controls were working and everything was fine.

This was the time our brave team had to get rid of clothes and make the great plunge for knowledge.

Lobo do Mar was really happy to get back into his favorite environment. On this picture you can see him checking the bait of our experiment.

The pilot turned out really fine and we were really glad and excited to see that our setting was yielding good results and our equipment proved to merit all the efforts we put in the building process. Our controls are working: no scavengers can get it, that fish is intact; the fish on the quadrat is being eaten much quicker than the one in the trap; and our trap is serving its purpose just right: capturing all the organisms that are attracted by this appealing smell. We got some freshwater eels (Lady Porpoise and Captain Penguin just ran away from those), a lot of baltic prawns (Palaemon adspersus and Palaemon elegans), lots of snails, mainly the Netted Dog whelk (Tritia sp.) and a HUGE amount of Common shore crabs (Carcinas maenas).

This is only one night’s harvest: we counted around 80 crabs... 
Oh yes because we haven’t told you yet: after deciding that we would carry out our study at two different sites, we decided that we would study the scavenging activity during the day and at night too! That means 6 sampling times during the night...Yeepee! Our Super Chef is still very enthusiastic and helpful and doesn’t mind staying up all night to accompany each group for their shift (thanks so much). We are bracing ourselves to get acclimated to longer and longer days followed by shorter and shorter nights. But we are dedicated and curious! Things are going well for the moment, we are collecting exploitable videos and photos, our fish are being eaten really fast, sun was even shining today, it was great. We are now excited about starting the analysis of the collected data, which will be quite soon.

Well it is now time for my midnight shift, I need to be going then, my wetsuit is waiting, keep posted friends, we’ll keep you in touch!

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