What has Emma been doing?...

Well, mostly I've been working with the fresh water ecology team in the school of zoology at uni. I have been helping out Lavi, an honours student and Anne, a phd student. I have been spending quite a lot of time at my microscope looking at bugs- mostly sorting water samples into plant matter and creepy crawlies.

I have also spent quite a large amount of time helping Lavi set up a feeding preference study where 30 amphipods and 30 cadisflies are given a choice of four different types of leaves very carefully weighed before and after to see how much of each they ate. The experiment has run for a week (see photo below) and was dismantled today so we should have the results soon-ish.

I have also been out into the field twice (once with Lavi, once with Anne). With Lavi I helped collect the caddis flies and amphipods for the feeding trial at Strickland Falls. I spent all day that day wading in the stream catching things. With Anne I travelled up to Tooms Lake to her experimental site on Tooms River. The main point of the trip was to put some mesh bags of cotton into the river and run a capture-mark-recapture experiment with leaves.

The point of the bags of cotton is that they are a standard measure of decomposition used in experiments all over the world. Cotton of a particular density is of a known tensile strength- you put it in the river then re-collect it in 6 weeks and test the tensile strength as a measure of the amount of decomposition that occurs in a particular river.

The point of the capture-mark- recapture experiment is to see if leaves that fall in the stream stay in the stream and get eaten or if they flow down the river.

This is the net across the river to catch the leaves that flow down the river.
This is Anne in her very beautiful waders.
These are our beautiful bright recapture leaves.
We put 80 pink and yellow leaves into the river and 40 of them ended up in our net. The other 40 got stuck in tree branches in the water. It is very useful information for Anne's thesis, and it was also quite a lot of fun. It was a lot like "Pooh sticks."

Anyway, I have finally gotten around to posting up some pictures so you should all be happy.