On Tuesday, November 1st we got a little break from collecting samples and stayed on dry land. Yipee! It was classroom time, so Megsie set out to teach us interns Stable Isotope Ecology and Mixing Models in Food Webs. Say What?!
Oh leftover Halloween candy! Chocolate wins again. Oh sorry Megsie, you said what?!
Back to the subject at hand...
Ah, I get it, carbon isotopes are important in studying food web dynamics. I think after this, is were I got lost.
Mmmmm chocolate!
Wait, Daniel do you get it?
So figuring out the carbon values helps us figure out the primary producer in the fishpond and who is eating who. Eating different primary producers will affect the carbon values in the consumers body tissues. Large differences of carbon between animals indicate that they have different food sources or that their food webs are based on different primary producers (phytoplankton, or epiphytes). By figuring out each carbon value of the different organisms in the fishpond we can figure out the food web dynamics of the fishpond. And so from our data we can determine who is eating who right?
Kind of?! It could be a combination
So what is occuring in the fishpond is an isotope mixing model.
Hmmm I could sure use some more chocolate.
But instead, task at hand...
What can we do to solve this problem and better figure out the food web dynamincs of the fishpond? Well, we can do tracers, or we can do gut content analysis of the crabs. Oooohhh, and looks like number 2 is our winner. Stay tuned to see what happens when we go crabing to analyze their gut contents.
Frances out!
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.