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This is the end

Hello everyone, so here is our last post about our Swedish scientific project on scavenging activity. Here are the answers to all your questions, the clues to solve the mystery, the revelations that you were all expecting. I mean, no, not exactly, that’s not how science is done. First we can’t give an absolute answer to any question mostly, and we do not answer such broad topics in 10 days.


So here we are for the last breakfast in this amazing place, today is presentations’ day. We’re holding on to the amazing sunset pictures we took all week to give us some strength.



We managed to finalyse our analysis and hand in our report (right on the last second actually). Our results and observations from the experiments show that the scavenging activity is higher during the night than during the day, in terms of rate of the process, it goes much faster. Almost every morning, when we retrieved the night’s experiment, there would be nothing left of the bait on the quadrat. This result was expected by our team since the beginning.
Another result is that there is no significant difference between our two study site. This was however a surprising result. We expected that, as they were different environments (sandy mud and rocky algae), they would be characterized by different benthic communities and then present a difference in terms of scavenging activity efficiency. We didn’t study the communities composition in details, but we saw the same scavengers species in our traps in both site, and the statistical results showed no difference in consumption rate.

We identified at least 14 species that came to feed on the carrions, which represent a relatively high biodiversity compared to similar studies. We witnessed some really interesting facts: starfish attracted by our bait, and we even recorded a anemone feeding on the carrion! This was highly surprising and it is even doubtful that it has been observed before, we definitely need to investigate this.

Well, here was what we can say about our adventure. We clearly learned a lot during this Summer School and hopefully became better future marine biologists. Those skills are bound to be useful for us in the future. This was also the opportunity of spending time together and building new friendships. The global result of this course is then highly positive.

Well now we need to face the trial of the presentation, wish us good luck. Thanks for your interest in our project, and if you want to know more, don’t hesitate to contact us!

Cheers,


Andrea Farinas (Iron Whale) - Margardi Castro (Super Chef) - Nelle Meyers (Magalon Don) - Loup Païtard (Lobo do Mar) - Louise Sabadel (Captain Penguin) - Patricia Martin Cabrera (TurtleWoman) - Ane Laborda (Lady Porpoise).

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