Dogwhelk rasping

My colleague Cory has been helping me try to record the rasping sounds of dogwhelks in the lab so we can tell when they are feeding and when they are just sitting still on a mussel. He's been working on figuring out all the hard- and software so far, and we are getting close! It turns out a small group of researchers at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA is also developing a way to do this! And they shared one of their recordings online!

Ever wondered what dogwhelk drilling sounds like? Wonder no more.

http://myweb.facstaff.wwu.edu/minerb2/extras/snailscraps.wav 

More November cage sampling

Here are more photos of my field work last week.

We have to take all the lids off every time we go out. 

On clear days we get a visit from these shorebirds! They blend in very well; how many can you see? 

Here is another borehole. 

Four painted snails in one shot! The orange one might be eating that large mussel.

These dogwhelks are from Lompoc, a site near Point Conception.

What is this arthropod-like creature squirming in the mussel matrix?

WSN conference poster

Last weekend I attended the Western Society of Naturalists annual meeting in Pasadena, California. I presented a poster about my ocean acidification study that tested the feeding behavior of drilling dogwhelks. It was a really fun weekend!

Octopus on mussel bed

We found this little dude crawling around the mussel beds last week.

Check out this article on their cool eyes!: http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/07/05/weird-pupils-let-octopuses-see-their-colorful-gardens/

Fun finds in the field

Today when we were checking the cages and counting the species in them, we saw some exciting intertidal things!

First, we found very obvious evidence that my predatory dogwhelks are indeed predators: there were many clear boreholes in mussels right next to them!

Here you can see a clean hole right through that mussel and my labeled dogwhelks—wearing pink and sparkly purple nail polish and circular orange number tags—in the background.

We also found an unexpected vertebrate in one of the cages!

Finally, a very active red octopus was crawling right next to us! I filmed it sliding by the cages and trying to hide under a flap.

It seems every time I go out I find something else I've never seen before, so check back soon for more updates!

Quality-checking DNA Sequences

I have updates on my genetics work! I have tried amplifying all my snail tissue samples now (and in many cases, I've tried multiple times), and the ones that amplified I've sent off to be sequenced. I finally got the sequences back and now it's time to check them for quality! I had always wondered what files with DNA sequences looked like: perhaps a text file with As, Cs, Ts, and Gs? Perhaps visualized in some cool color scheme in a program I don't have?

It turns out the latter was closer to the truth—at least with the program I am using. In 4Peaks, you view the sequences as colored peaks, called a chromatogram, where each color is a different nitrogenous base. Yesterday I learned how to distinguish between a clearly defined sequence read and a messy read that can't be used in analyses because we won't be able to tell the bases apart. Here's what that looks like!

This is a very clear read and will be used to help me identify the snail species!

This is a poor read. You can see that in many cases, multiple colors are peaking. That means we don't know what base is at that site.