Baseline communities and predators ready

I am finally, finally, finally ready to record the official baseline communities in each plot and add the predatory snail treatments!

I thought I was ready to do this two weeks ago, but I didn't have a protocol for community assessment then, and by the time I developed it, the tides were not low enough so I had to wait two weeks. At least the low tides are in the daytime now!

I decided on a community sampling scheme that includes recording all the species of barnacles and algae in each cage, plus the total number of anemones and dead mussels, including those with boreholes. I'm also tracking the abundance of littorines (Littorina spp.), limpets (Lottia spp.), and turban snails (Tegula spp.). Right now those cover the vast majority of what I see in the plots; hopefully, that will change as the experiment proceeds, because it may mean my treatments are having an effect!

An open cage with a quadrat over it while we count 

the community of organisms living inside.

All the snails are labeled and colored according to what cage they will go in. All the cages have the same mean snail size so I don't confound predator treatment with size. In every cage, there will be five snails, and each is painted a different color so it will be easy to find all five each time I go out to check on them.

Two-thirds of the list of snail ID, color, and cage 

that tells me where each of the 120 snails goes.

I'll be out there every low this week, so if you see bright yellow construction vests down the cliff, you know what we're up to!