Wednesday, August 25, 2004

Currently Reading Elementary Statistics in a World of Applications (4th Edition) By Ramakant Khazanie see related

The first few weeks have been amazingly eventfull. Not entirely good, and not bad, just full of randomness. Like, for instance I've been spending proportionately more time working on Campus Girl Scouts and Hall stuff than school work (probably already to my detriment). Anyway, it's been a good time thus far, and sadly I'm forced into melancholy when I'd rather be having fun because of a certain individual who shall remain unamed. I hate being dependent.
I think the best thing that happened today is field ecology lab. We spent 4 hours outdoors doing a mark-recapture study at NESA and the weather was great! I know it rained and all that, but it wasn't hot or all that humid which was sooooo nice for the Coloradoan;) Anyway, in those 4 hours we skeined (sp?) this small pond for fish 5 times and then marked the fishes we caught in this net by cutting off part or most of their dorsal fin (poor little fishies) and then tossed them back in the pond and went back in and skeined 5 more times (bringing my total times in the water to 3!). Then we looked at each fish we caught and counted total numbers of fishes and total in the second sample population that had been marked previously to estimate population size. In that small pond there were aproximately 502 fish! I'm pretty amazed at myself. I thought I might be more squeamish than I actually was. But no! I was in that water sometimes almost up to my neck in water and almost to my ankles in mud! I held so many fish today and even cut a few of the dorsal fins (I preferred holding the fish to cutting them, personally). On one of the runs I did I was in the middle of the skein net (that was when I almost ended up swimming) we caught a bullfrog. And we kept catching these HUGE tadpoles and we even caught a small bass in the process of eating one of the smaller fishes. And amazingly enough I think I came away with only one bug bite. Next week I may not be so lucky We're studying terrestrial insects in the forest reserve... and I've never had a tick before and the wild spiders out here in Kansas are HUGE! Yikes:O
Ahhh, biology... nothing better!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You started one of these! haha Now I'll know what you're up to. It's like spying..with permission.