Experimental Design= pretty much complete

Today I was able to sleep in because we didn't have to collect anything else from the harbor. I walked to the lab with one of the other REU girls around 9:00 and got started sorting through some more ulva and looking for amphipods and isopods. After doing that for 2 hours I spent 2 hours reading papers and trying to finalize ideas for my project.

I also finalized my project idea with my mentor, and I will be comparing habitat preference of one large species of amphipod with the habitat preference of the most abundant isopod species. We went into a lot of detail, but the main idea is that we want to try to find out why the amphipod species is found predominantly in ulva and why the isopod species is found on the surface of eelgrass. There are three different sections of the experiment and we'll get started on the first one on Monday.

First of all, we will need to collect at least 100 more isopods. Nearly all of the amphipods are already living in algae from an experiment that no one has touched in over 6 months. I'm excited to plan out my experiment on paper later tonight. I think the most challenging part will be indentifying the animals as either male, female, or brooding female, as well as trying to find individuals from each species within certain size ranges for different parts of the project.

This weekend should be pretty chill- I'm planning on going out to help my roommate collect a certain species of crab in the intertidal zone tomorrow morning at 6:30, and then I'm going to go with my mentor and maybe a couple other REU students to an oil drilling protest somewhere in the harbor area. On Sunday morning I'll probaby go to the lab and change the water in my isopod and amphipod containers.