Abandon Ship!

The U.S.S Bunting shall sail no more! She carried us a long way, but her journey has ended. Alas, she's run aground on the Rock of Low Testosterone, and the Nesterly Winds are not enough to keep her going. We must board the SIA lifeboats and hope for rescue ship. Otherwise, our journey will have been in vain. Ahoy! The U.S.S. Fire Ant has responded to our S.O.S.! We're saved! The Generalist has offered to carry us to our destination, the Trophic Tropics, and it can do so much faster than the bunting could. Hooray!

See kids? Science is an adventure!

Yeah, Candice, Julian, and I had a conference call with Dr. Levey and decided that we weren't going to be able to collect enough blood samples to conclude anything about trophic niche. So in order to stay with the stable isotope analysis and trophic niche premise, we decided to pick another generalist species that would be easy to collect. Fire ants are everywhere and eat everything (almost). Fire ants it is, then.

Fortunately, our collection method of grabbing a handful in a ziploc bag, then throwing them in a freezer at the end of the day, will minimize the potential for bites/stings. Once they're dead from the freezing, we'll pick out however many we need for SIA, label them, and hand them over to SREL, essentially. Best part is, we don't have to set up a net and wait for them. We just walk right over, piss them off, and grab some of the swarm. Seems pretty doable in the 3 weeks or so we have left. Julian's gone home now, which leaves us on our own, but I think we'll be fine.

We also have a side commitment of collecting fruits, seeds, and bugs from patches to make a catalog of stable isotope signatures, but that's easy enough.

So things are looking up, I've been having fun (but not too much) with the other researchers, I'll be in the Netherlands in less than a month, and ... yeah that's pretty much it.

R.I.P.
U.S.S. Bunting