#turtle research

[cialisbl]

Easter Treats Help Protect Endangered Mary River Punk Turtles

Easter Treats Help Protect Endangered Mary River Punk Turtles

Many of us are indulging in sweet treats this weekend, from chocolate eggs to bunnies and, of course, Easter bilbies. But have you ever tried a chocolate Mary River turtle? Key points: A Queensland Landcare group is selling chocolate turtles to fund research on endangered turtles. Mary River turtles are known as butt-breathing turtles because they draw oxygen from gills on their rear…

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[thespeculation4201]

Summertime: The best time for a curious little biologist Red lionfish: Pterois volitans Sea turtle: Chelonia mydas mydas Jellyfish: Actually just the mesoglia (the "jelly" of the jellyfish). It is the last part to decompose Photocred @thespeculation4201

[heretherebdragons]

And so far it looks pretty cool! I think I might be able to do some of the things I planned to do in ArcGIS in SAM instead, and a bit more easily. We shall see. It took me all evening to import a data set (for a really stupid reason I should have caught a lot sooner, but OH WELL :D. I thought it was a Mac to PC problem, and part of it was, but part of it was that I had a numeric value in one of my column labels and apparently the program hates that).

ANYHOODLE there they are. Those are ALL the nests we've found for this particular population of turtles in six years of field research. (Including viable nests, nest attempts, and predated nests). This isn't the data set I'll use for the meat of my analysis; I'm just going to use these to calculate a mean nest distance value for this population. But this was a good place to start with SAM, I think. Tomorrow, I'll play around with this a bit more and see what cool stuff I can do. For now though, I like it. And I guess I can put together some sort of presentation about it, assuming this is what my professor decides he wants me to teach. Even if he ends up having me do stuff in JMP (or even SAS), it's okay - I'm glad to be having the opportunity to learn a bit about SAM. I think it might be really useful to me down the road. 

[heretherebdragons]

So, I WaNTED to play TESO tonight, but my PC isn't cooperating (so I'm downloading it onto my Mac, but that means no playing until tomorrow). Instead, I faffed around in ArcGIS, and I managed to do THIS!!! *points up excitedly* Okay, so it might not look like much. Just points on a map, right? BUT THIS IS HUGE I figured out how to get my data and a basemap into GIS all by myself and I also how to measure distances between points (I still need to figure out a few other things, but I've mostly figured out the things I need to do). WITHOUT TAKING A CLASS AHHHHH yeah, I'm pretty happy right now. OH HELL YES!

ETA: also, I lol'd when I looked at the whole screenshot. Um, yeah, this is my "school" computer, and almost all the icons are gaming stuff. OOPS.

[heretherebdragons]

I did a thing

So, I have finally gotten my datasheet organized to my satisfaction. I HAVE FINALLY GOTTEN MY DATASHEET ORGANIZED TO MY SATISFACTION!!!! NO SERIOUSLY this is huge. :D There are still a few things to do - I need to add daily temperature information (but someone else is looking that up for me - it's so good to have minions undergrads - I'll just need to cut and paste it in when she's done), and I need to calculate a whole bunch of stuff in GIS - but, I couldn't DO those calculations until I had all this other stuff finished. So this is a really big step. 

I will analyze 109 nest locations, laid by 40 individual turtles over the course of 6 years. That's a decent sample size for a master's project of this type. WHOO HOO! It's actually really cool to have it all in one place like this for the very first time. 

[heretherebdragons]

[holdmedown22]

These 8 hour days are killing me but they're pretty awesome. This research opportunity has been a great experience so far and is a small but important step towards my future.

[heretherebdragons]

OH GOD RESPONSIBLE ADULT TIME

So, I read another paper this evening, and this one was MUCH better than the one I complained about last week. I think it helped me come up with two legit ways to evaluate nest site fidelity, so YAY. And YAY for a methods section that doesn't suck. :D