IMBRSea Joint School - Adventures at the Swedish Coast

Snail mail in your feed once more! To provide you with more news and recent findings of one of the most intriguing experiments in Tjärnö bay: our ongoing research project on Littorina saxatilis. Our team decided to look at the possible impact of light and plastic pollution on these little guys - they are so small - Or well, at least one of the ecotypes is small: the wave ecotype only reaches a size of approximately 5mm and have a stronger grip on the rocks compared to the crab ecotype. The crab ones can get a little bigger, reaching approximately 15mm. So, as we were wondering what we had to wonder, and what this periwinkle was wondering, we eventually decided to stop wondering and started planning our experimental set-up. For the light experiments, the first idea we came up with was to separate a small amount of both ecotypes in gridded boxes – imagine a grid pattern drawn on your lunch box – and see if there would be any difference in movement of the snails between boxes exposed ...

Hermit crab blog - here we go again! The last couple of days were somehow peaceful, as us Frankensteins were busy with lab work. We finished this morning, though! Finally! Considering everything that could have gone wrong, it looks like we have some nice powerful data. I feel a little bad for our fellow groups who are not that lucky. I have a hypothesis, though: my newly discovered prophetic powers are a gift from Apollo, the Greek god of knowledge. I guess that makes me a modern day incarnation of the Oracle of Delphi? So he’s bound to be smiling down at us. Maybe he will even convince Athena to throw in some wisdom to give us strength to deal with data analysis in R. That calls for a big offering to the gods, though. Being poor students, unfortunately, we don’t have a cow or a goat at hand, so we will have to think of something else. This is us, in case you forgot our faces :) Time to recapture what has happened in our lab ordeal. Where did we stop? Right. Creating a behavioural...