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The WFSU Ecology Blog

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Notes From the FieldSeagrasses and Sand Flats

Notes From the Field: Leashing Your Clams

by Tanya December 12, 2012
by Tanya December 12, 2012 0 comment
Tanya Rogers FSU Coastal & Marine Lab

IGOR chip_ predators_NCE 150It’s a problem commonly faced by field biologists: You want to put some particular critters out in the field in various places, but how do you keep them from getting swept away or wandering off too far, and how do you ever find them again later to see how they did? Behold the tether! So long as tethers are designed not to interfere too much with the animals’ natural behavior (walking around, burrowing, etc), leashing them to a fixed object is generally a good way to relocate them (provided you study something like crabs or snails and not lions or bald eagles). The other fun benefit of tethering marine invertebrates: you can take them for walks (albeit slow ones).

I recently conducted an experiment in which I put tethered baby clams (sunray venus and quahog, about 12 mm long) out on Bay Mouth Bar to see how their growth, survivorship, and burial depth was affected by (1) their location on the bar (NE, SW, SE, NW) and (2) the type of habitat the clams were in (sand, shoal grass, turtle grass). I checked on the clams a month later: some were still alive and growing, others were dead with clues indicating their likely cause of demise – gaping shell with no damage (stress), cracked shell (eaten by crab), drill hole in shell (eaten by predatory snail). My preliminary analysis suggests that survivorship and causes of death varied between habitat types. Next I hope to do a similar sort of study with tethered snails on Bay Mouth Bar.

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In the Grass, On the Reef is funded by the National Science Foundation.

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Tanya

Tanya Rogers was Dr. David Kimbro’s research assistant and worked primarily on the collaborative study of oyster biogeography and ecosystem processes featured in this blog. She has a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Puget Sound in Washington, and has done undergraduate research at Bodega Marine Laboratory and Friday Harbor Laboratories. She is interested in marine community ecology and conservation, as well as natural history and scientific illustration. She is now a graduate student for Dr. Kimbro at Northeastern University.

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Florida milkvetch

Florida milkvetch (Astragalus obcordatus) in the Munson Sandhills

When I test out a new camera, I usually head to a random spot in the Munson Sandhills and take a series of videos and photos. This small flower caught my eye, as almost nothing was in bloom. I identified it as Florida milkvetch (Astragalus obcordatus) in iNaturalist, and it was confirmed.
I then saw a photo of this plant in a Facebook group for native plant enthusiasts. It turns out this is kind of a rare plant, and one botanist went so far as to classify it as imperiled. It pays to keep your eyes down by your feet when walking in the sandhills.

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iNaturalist became a part of the WFSU Ecology Blog during the EcoCitizen Project in 2019.  Since then, we’ve used it to help identify the many plants and animals we see on our shoots.  And on the Backyard Blog, we show how it can be used to identify weeds and garden insects, to help figure out what’s beneficial or a possible pest.  Below is the iNaturalist profile belonging to WFSU Ecology producer Rob Diaz de Villegas.

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