Out To Estill Fork Tomorrow In The Cold

Since the new moon is tomorrow, we're going to Estill Fork to run the driftnet and collect telescopes and scarlets. The low temperature here will in the upper 30s F, unseasonably cold, so it's definitely a waders trip.

We had a lab meeting yesterday where four of the students in my lab gave short reports on their work this semester (five if you include Andrew talking about writing up his findings from the summer, largely in the Technical Writing class). It's all good work, steady progress in examining some basic ecology of Estill Fork especially. Taito has about finished examining almost 30 telescopes from Estill Fork last December for gill flukes, and the average number of flukes per fish was 0.7, even lower than the numbers we already have for February and September (~1.5 per fish) at the ends of our 2007 collection. That's consistent with our prediction that in the middle of the winter the fluke numbers should bottom out, with a rebound to over 7 per fish in May or June. The one month's collection we still need is November, which we'll hopefully get next month.

Brittany's work with the driftnet collection is also fun, with the number of odonates (dragonflies) steadily dropping from July to September, and the number of copepods steadily increasing. She has found representatives from 17 Orders of macroinvertebrates, mostly arthropods but also some oligochaete worms. It dawned on me the other day that her work might benefit from applying some diversity indices to it, as well as some form of ANOVA, to better understand how the diversity structure changes month to month (if it does, that is...).