Where the science happens

Earlier this week, Jacquelyn Gill on Twitter said she wanted to see lab and fields sites. Let’s start with a field site:

Here is one of the places I go to collect sand crabs (Lepidopa benedicti) on South Padre Island, Texas (see Nasir & Faulkes 2011). This is some ways north on the beach, away from the main town center. You can see some of the high-rise hotels in the distance.

This particular day is not a happy collecting day: the amount of shells on the beach makes digging for the beasties a pain, pain, pain.The cloud cover is welcome, though. As you might imagine, south Texas sunshine while shoveling ten meter transects on the beach is, um, rather warm (euphemism for “sweating like a pig”). More papers from this site are forthcoming, I hope!

Sorry, Jacquelyn, but you’re not getting a picture of my lab until after the end of semester / start of summer clean up. Here’s an old one, with a crayfish condo under construction (I talked about this on another blog; see also Jimenez & Faulkes 2010; she’s the first author of that paper).

References

Jimenez SA, Faulkes Z. 2010. Establishment and care of a laboratory colony of parthenogenetic marbled crayfish, Marmorkrebs. Invertebrate Rearing 1(1): 10-18.
http://inverts.info/content/establishment-and-care-laboratory-colony-parthenogenetic-marbled-crayfish-marmorkrebs

Nasir U, Faulkes Z. 2011. Color polymorphism of sand crabs, Lepidopa benedicti (Decapoda, Albuneidae). Journal of Crustacean Biology 31(2): 240-245. DOI: 10.1651/10-3356.1