Recomeçando

Esse blog foi criado com o intuito de ser um portfólio das minhas vivências acadêmicas. No início, o objetivo era associar o blog ao meu currículo, um requisito para as universidades internacionais. Hoje, a cada dia que passa, me vejo mais distante dessa tão sonhada oportunidade em universidades no exterior. Não porque eu não possa mais me aplicar, mas porque já não faz tanto sentido para mim. Hoje, eu quero usar meus conhecimentos para construir algo no meu país, no meu estado. Talvez em outro momento, tudo mude novamente. Mas hoje é isso. Aos poucos vou inserir aqui um pouco da minha experiência com a gestão e os produtos que estou ajudando a construir na Secretaria do Meio Ambiente da Bahia.

Field sampling on Brazilian mangrove

Master experiment

Tethering small juvenile crabs

As part of my master, I decided to assess predation on juvenile fiddler crabs  (Genus Leptuca) using tethering technique.

This technique consists on fasten an animal to a line attached somewhere on field in order to assess something, like predation rates. It is widely used on “large” animals, such as the blue crab, but on smaller animals is harder to find information on how to make the technique work without killing the individual by manipulating it.

At first I found some problems to make the tethering technique work and here comes my adversities and my solution to it.

The inviduals are fast so is hard to hold them, and I’m likely to kill them by trying or to glue the line elsewhere, like a leg or an eye. I tried to anesthetize them with mentol, but it took time and I needed to be fast so I would be able do more replicates. Then, I tried to put ice on the water, but it only worked while the individuals where inside the water. As soon as I took them of the ice they woked up and were wet, while I needed them to be dry for the glue to work. I tried to put the Petri dish above an ice plate, but the crabs died very fast. All that on field. At last, I tried to put the individuals on refrigerator at the station for just the amount of time for them to stop moving. I found that 5 minutes were enough, but they still started moving quite fast, so I puted them individualy on the refrigerator and took them out one at a time.

       

Once I managed to glue the juveniles properly I was able to set a pilot on field. Images above show how it looked like. On the left there is a juvenile fiddler crab glued to a fishing line and on the right the line with predation marks.

First of many (I hope so)

As a first post I would like to tell how I entered ecology.

It all started in a benthology class in which 50% of the grade was composed of a group project. First class: Find a question!

Is it revelant? No? Find a question! Is it relevant? I guess! Can you answere it? No? Find another question! Done? Is it relevant? Can you answere it? Do it!

Do a sample design, choose the stats, go to field, treat everything in the lab, treat the data, write, write and write some more. Doing everything for the first time was scary, hard and, well, fun!

These were us… very much prepared!

If I look back I can’t count how many mistakes I’ve probably done back then. But the effort granted me an invitation to participate of the Benthic Ecology Lab. And I’ve been working there ever since!