Week Eight: October 13 - 19

Monday was our 'day off' from practicums, but since Matt and Brian wouldn't be available for salamander hunting this week, L and I worked on something else instead - mesocosms. Brian's going to be doing some research in Panama working with Panamanian Golden Frog tadpoles, and in order to keep those little guys safe from all the things that want to eat them (including ocelots!), he made a prototype of a mesh mesocosm that the tadpoles could be kept inside. L and I were tasked with making two more prototypes, since they have their sewing machine here (mine, unfortunately, is otherwise occupied right now). It took all day, and two long video essays as background noise, but eventually we were able to finish both prototypes! I think they turned out pretty well, but I'm not exactly eager to do it again - sewing the chains on had to be done by hand, and pushing a needle through four layers of bias tape and two of mesh is not my idea of fun. I know this is the sort of menial labor that undergrads are meant for, but ouch!

Tuesday was an actual day off, which was pretty nice. I think I spent most of it sleeping, since I was fighting off an allergy-induced sinus infection.

Wednesday was our Journal Club, and this one was the one I got to lead! We were discussing the SLOSS debate - the question of whether a few large areas (SL) or several small (SS) ones hold more biodiversity. Even though it feels like that would be an easy answer (large, duh), the opposite actually seems to be true in most cases! The specific paper we were reading was a meta-analysis of various SLOSS studies, comparing their methodologies and circumstances to determine if there was any clear underlying cause for the prevalance of SS beating out SL. Whether or not there is any such single cause is still ambiguous, but the trends of the data are clear: preserving those small patches can be even more impactful for biodiversity under most conditions. We had a pretty good conversation about the importance of suiting your management to the actual situation, not just what you expect the situation to be.

After that, we did some analysis of our data from last week's watershed work. It was pretty interesting to see the different trends, and trying to figure out why - for instance - our phosphates peaked at Lewis Falls rather than at the wastewater plant outflow was a fun little puzzle. We have to present our data trends for the Hawksbill Creek watershed (from Lewis Springs down to Luray) alongside our watershed modelling of the Happy Creek watershed we did last week, trying to find patterns and logic in both of them. I'm looking forward to seeing the trends that emerge!

I also went to a presentation one of the visiting genomics people (Taylor Haines) was giving about parrot genomics. Learning about his research and all the weird ways that parrots can hybridize (even with different karyotypes) was so fun. Apparently, one of the reasons birds - especially parrots - can speciate so quickly is because they have only microchromosomes, which are more prone to breaking apart and creating 'new' genomes. Turtles are the only other group that have exclusively microchromosomes (most animals have either just macrochromosomes or a mix of both), which means that somehow that trait evolved separately, twice! Birds are so weird. Taylor was a great presenter, though - he has so much energy and passion about his work, and he's absolutely hilarious.

Thursday was our day to talk about stakeholder analysis, through the lens of the conservation story of the bobwhite quail. For any sort of conservation plan to actually work, you need to understand and involve the community, otherwise the pushback or lack of engagement can kill a project before it even gets started. Learning how to do that effectively, and which groups to include to what degree, is a key part of actually doing conservation effectively. For me, it was really interesting to get a slightly different perspective on public engagement. My previous class on the subject came with the very strong philosophy that meaningful involvement of the public was the most important thing (see: Arnstein's Ladder) and focused on how to facilitate that. The way we talked about it was a bit different, and a bit more analytical - pruning down groups based on their influence and how much they would be impacted to determine the key groups that need to be involved. It felt a little bit wrong, honestly, though I understand why prioritizing the groups that are actually likely to care is important from a resources and practicality perspective. Part of it is scale; my PPEG class was on the level of city, state, and federal governances which could often directly impact peoples' lives, and conservation often happens on a subtler level. Still... I think I'm going to need to let this one percolate for a bit to figure out how I want to handle these sorts of issues in my own conservation work in the future.

We talked about qualitative data gathering methods in the afternoon. This was pretty tricky! Designing survey questions that aren't leading or too broad/narrow to answer effectively is way harder than I was expecting. It was a lot of fun, though, and I'm glad we got the practice. Stephanie also gave some good advice about how to have conversations about conservation issues (or any environmental issue, really) with skeptics. I always struggle with those sorts of discussions, because I feel like if I just give people more information in the right way, they'll suddenly click and understand. I know that's not how that actually works, but I still struggle to put that into practice sometimes.

Right after class, I went to a talk by a postdoc who did his doctoral work on tigers in India (Zehidul Hussain). Essentially, he tracked 16 (ish) sub-adult tigers as they went from staying in their mother's territory, to travelling, to finally settling down in their own space. As they travelled, he logged how far they went, where they went, and whether the places they travelled were urbanized or protected. He was able to use that data to show trends in tiger movement based on human influence on their habitat! It seems that they move more and further at night when in human-dense areas, information which could be really useful to predicting and preventing human-tiger conflicts. The talk was pretty interesting, even though we had some technical difficulties at the start.

On Friday, we talked about the history of agriculture and how it relates to the environment. We pretty much went through the whole timeline of (mostly crop-based) agriculture since the early 1900s up until today. It felt like all the best parts of history class, getting to see the trends build and change over time. And we're the reason that Jim has to add a new decade to this lecture for future groups! That's pretty cool, I think.