Grinnin' and pickin' OR From the Annals of Never Again Cited Research

Exhibit A. The author, birthday princess, destroys crustaceans as celebration ritual. Date? Let's just say: pre-Y2K.
At right, the one remaining shot glass I can find. There was definitely an "I got crabs in Maryland" one at some point.

A lot of people, especially in the PNW, love crabs because they are tasty, but, and here is a confession that I hope nobody ever finds out: I don't eat crabs [anymore]. I grew up in Maryland and every year for my birthday we'd pick blue crabs. I remain fiercely proud of that part of my heritage, as evidenced my collection of unused shot glasses. But by college I had phased all meat, including seafood, out of my diet. My crab-picking skills, earned at the cost of a thousand million cuts to that sensitive part of my fingers between the nail and last knuckle, seasoned with Old Bay and left sizzling for days(1), are moot, a party trick at best.

I love crabs because they are fierce, because they have personality, and they have a rep for holding it down in the intertidal. I enjoy feeding crabs by hand because I'm a total weirdo, and I find it completely satisfying. Here, you watch this and tell me if I'm crazy.

Super intense, right!?(2)

There are numerous examples in the literature of crabs keeping snails at bay by just straight up eating them. Thus, you might surmise, if you have read way back in this blog to the part where I used to write about actual science that I actually did, that I would be reeeeeeeally curious to see if crabs would eat any of my invasive snails - in particular my favorite Mollusca Non-Grata, the Japanese oyster drill (Ocenebra inornata(3)). Previous research, done by,  *cough cough*, yours truly, pointed to at least a willingness of crabs to eat these snails when you throw them in a bucket together. But that's frankly pretty unimpressive - crabs will eat anything you throw them in a bucket with. What happens in natura(4)?

It was just like this...Photo of the author in her natural habitat
Credit: Nima Yazdani.

Answering that question was the goal of my summer of 2011. And if you're wondering, gee, Emily, that was HALF OF A DECADE AGO, why are you telling us about this now? It turns out half a decade is exactly how long it took me to get this work published(5)!

I'll set the scene: Emily, way out on a beautifully restored native oyster bed on only the sunniest of sunny PNW days, clean and well rested, scratching her chin and waxing genius about ecological dynamics of restoration.

J slash K. It was nothing like that. I had so much generous help. Second off, it never looked like I had it together out there even for a second. Field work is a slog. When you do work in the intertidal, it's a panicked slog, as you race to get your work done before the tide comes back. In the muddy intertidal, it's a panicked slog in painful, hilariously clumsy, slow motion as you race against the returning tide ankle deep in mud. I consider myself relatively fleet of foot in moving across mud in waders, but it's not pretty, I assure you.

So I called for help. I had a slew of helpers: 

• Nima, a classmate's husband, who was interested in seeing what the work of scientists actually looks like. He took the beautiful picture above.  I'm grateful not to have seen any close ups of what I actually looked like that day. 
• Avanthi, a classmate's girlfriend (now wife :) ), who was an amazing trooper, helping me swap out oysters on very little sleep as I recall. 
• Marie, my actual classmate, she and I carried approximately 17 million tons of rebar down the shore and across the mud - how we did it, I can't remember. I think it was one of those, well, there's really no one else who's going to do it if we don't - moments.

I also had excellent logistical support from a number of people:

• Brian Allen at Puget Sound Restoration Fund helped me get access to the oyster beds, which were under PSRFs restoration care - they put out old oyster shell to provide habitat for new babies to settle on. Brian also tried his best to teach me to pilot a tiny Whaler with an outboard, and I discovered that there are some skills that I need more than 2.5 minutes to learn. To this day, I cannot operate an outboard.
• Joth who gave me sacrificial oysters from his own farm! That's right, the shirt off his back to support graduate research. 
• Molly and her father Greg, who helped ferry me said oysters.
• Jen, my advisor, who taught me how to make oyster pops, and helped me secure lots of random supplies for building cages. "Sure, you need 20 old oyster bags? I'll have Alan bring them up and leave them outside Kincaid". 
• Not LEAST, Dave and Sue, the amazing couple who not only helped me get beach access from shore (note previous comment about inability to learn how to pilot a boat), but invited me in for coffee (pre tide flat) and soda (post tide flat) multiple times. Seriously, I can't tell you how much I love meeting the lovely shoreline owners!

This list doesn't even include my co-author Eric, who stuck it out with me through a long writing, rewriting, analyzing, re-analyzing, revising, and, yes, re-revising, which was evidently so traumatic that it caused his lung call it quits and spontaneously collapse. Sorry, Eric.

So that picture where I'm out there looking like John Muir on my own doing science and looking ruggedly picturesque - that's not what it's like. This is a list of 11 people who made this one tiny(6) experiment possible, and that doesn't include the grad students who reached deep into their closets and donated as many wire hangers as they could muster (which, naturally, I didn't end up needing...), and Alan who drove the oyster bags up from Willapa, and Eddie who tolerated the mess I made on the loading dock, and the guy who stole all the rebar from the loading dock - wait that last one maybe doesn't need a thank you.

But you get the point. It takes a village people, this is how the sausage is made, and now the paper is published (Link here click on me, I am a link and I will take you to Emily and Eric's paper, and you clicking on me will increase the paper stats! Even if you don't think that sort of thing should be important, it is. So click on me, come on, why haven't you clicked yet? Seriously, you read this far and haven't clicked? For Shame! <--Did you find the Easter egg in there? is it an Easter egg if I tell you it's in there?). 

In classic Emily style, I managed to get my act together to write this post only too late to give you access to the paper via the temporary open access link. Now it is paywalled (but you can email me). So I'll have to write another post where I tell you what all the fuss was even for, but first, I have to remember.

TUNE IN NEXT TIME TO FIND OUT

(Fair warning: there's a good chance you will be disappointed).


References and Miscellany
1. Seriously, I love Old Bay, but the trauma of picking remains in my flesh memory. 
2. Confession number two of this post: mostly I just put that music on there to cover up my voice in the video. I thought this added an air of drama to the proceedings. The crabs I trained to eat from my forceps were really chill, they knew they didn't need to go crazy to get their din din.
3. For more history on previous work with this species, check out OG Blog stuffs here and here.
4. How completely obnoxious is it to say it in Latin instead of just swapping the last "a" for an "e"?!
5. Even after I quadrupled the number of monkeys working at typewriters and it STILL took that long!
6. Really, I can't even tell you how small this in the scheme of things, and yet what an unbelievable amount of work it was.

Coming in off the mud OR Terrestrial Radulas

There is a certain euphoria to be felt when your foot hits the first piece of truly solid ground coming in off the mud. Traversing the mud for hours at a time is a freaking slog, sure, but what's more surprising about it is how a short time on a mudflat subsumes every other walking experience you've ever had. You don't think, "Walking in the mud is hard!" but, "Walking is hard!" because mud is the only walking your body remembers at that exhausted, oxygen-starved, moment. In that incalculably small instant your foot gains leverage on something hard, the world suddenly becomes a different place: the curtain lifts and true enlightenment as to the ease with which walking can actually be accomplished is achieved. This temporarily endows you with a giddy sense of unlimited power and endless possibility. I suppose I get a little high off it. 

I worked what was hopefully my last tide of the season yesterday. So, to celebrate my return to a mostly terrestrial lifestyle for the next 6 months, I'ma post some short videos of land-based gastropods I took this summer during short visits to terra firma.  

Video 1: Slugga vs. Mushroom

My remarkable niece came out for her first PNW visit this summer (and I guess her parents came with her too...) and we went on a walkabout in the Anacortes Community Forest Lands (1).  I spotted this slug (2). As my friend Brad just pointed out, you never really see slugs doing anything, mostly they just slug along.  So seeing this one chow down on a mushroom was sweet.  I had Attenborough dreams in my head, as I was recording this, of getting a long clip and speeding it up, time-lapse style.  Oh well, this is what you get, you can fill in the gaps in your head.  Maggie is/was in a "What does the cow say?" phase, so we stepped up the challenge.  I'm still not clear on what a slug does say, but they probably say it veeeeery slooooowly (thank you very much folks! come back tomorrow, completely different show!).

Video 2: Snail vs. Lettuce

The video narrates itself (witness my mad iMovie skillz - stock soundtrack and everything!).  The snails are translucent (!!!) and so freaking fast (!!!), relatively speaking of course (3). Unfortunately, the beating heart of the snail doesn't show up on the video, but I could see it when I got close. When I have the chance I love to garden so I am not particularly attached to these buggers beyond nerd-fascination, but - **Note: I didn't actually eat any of the snails, at least knowingly or intentionally. I gave up eating mollusks (actually all sea creatures) for Lent years ago and have been clean since.

References and miscellany:

(1) ACFL is by far one of the most awesome things about Anaco.  Huge tracts of lands owned by the city just for cruising around.

(2) I sure don't know what kind of slug it is.  2 Points if you can ID it for me.
(3) Previous Attenborough aspirations notwithstanding, this video is also in real-time.

Field Season Missive #3 OR This Is What It Would Be Like If David Bowie Were a Marine Ecologist

Here's what I did today:

Figure 1.  My trajectory today.  Note, the conversion factor for walking in mud is approximately 1 mud mile = 700,000 regular miles.

Here's what it looked like at Wy.214:

Figure 2. Me 'n my trusty quarter-meter quadrat.  Actually this is quadrat 2.0, the first edition was broken. We be countin' snails.

My dad hung out on the trail running along this part of the bay, and I radioed(1) my measurements back to him for data recording purposes. There were more than a few Major Tom moments (ooh this one is cool!), but it more or less worked, and I didn't get my dad stuck in the mud again.

References and miscellany:

(1) Yeah I thought that looked wrong too, so I looked it up, and that really is how you spell it, go figure.