Projects!

So by now we're all deep into our second research projects at Palo Verde. The first two projects of the term are faculty initiated, meaning our professor and each of the two TAs come up with a project question and it's up to us (working in three different groups) to develop a hypothesis and methods to test it.  Our first projects all involved looking at the mutualism that exists between Acacia trees and Acacia ants--the tree gives the ants a home and food, and the ants protect the tree from other herbivores and competition from other tree species.  Acacia ants come in 3 species, some more aggressive than others.  The project I was involved in looked for a correlation between species aggression and the rate of response to percieved herbivory (basically us hitting the tree with a stick).  We also looked to see if the different species had different levels response based on the initial density of ants on the tree trunk in a 10 cm length of trunk around the "herbivory".  We found that all three species of ant responded very quickly to a disturbance, with activity levels peaking between 0 and 15 seconds after the disturbance.  We also found that while one species of ant increases its activity by the same percentage regardless of initial ant density at the site of disturbance, the strength of response by the other two ant species was dependent on how many ants were already at the disturbance sight.  None of us really had any idea what to expect from the project or whether we would get significant data, but by the end of the day we were all laughing at how excited we were about Acacia ants. 

Yesterday we started our second faculty initiated projects, all three of which asked a different question about the behavior of various animals.  There was a butterfly question, an iguana question, and a fish question...all of which involved catching the study subject.  I ended up doing the fish project, although definitely the most exciting part of the day yesterday was watching the iguana group try to surround and pounce on an iguana.  My group decided to try to catch fish in the wetland, but after a few minutes slurping around ankle-deep in muck and knee-deep in invasive water hyacinth we decided to catch our fish in the watering hole instead.  The watering hole is about 3/4 of a mile from the station and used to be a water source for the ranch that existed here before the area was a national park.  Apparently it's one of the only sources of fresh water for wildlife during the dry season, so it's a really good place to see animals.  While we were there yesterday we saw 4 or 5 scarlet macaws that live in a tree nearby.  Anyways, using a seine net we caught a bunch of fish, mainly of two different species, and organized our experiment around whether one of these species would change their behavior based on which side of their tank we added food to.  So basically I spent all of this morning feeding and watching fish:)

Tomorrow we start talking about ideas for our first student initiated projects, which is mildly intimidating but also exciting.  I'm kind of hoping to keep looking at the fish we used today.

Time for dinner!
-Madi