Summer 2017 Data Collection

This blog post is going to be full of photos of liver, flies, spiders and eggs. Stop here if that grosses you out. Otherwise, read on. I think it's pretty neat. 

I've been doing a lot of data collection. There's a lot more to do, but it is doing quite well. I have a good idea what the data is going to say, but I haven't attempted to run any stats yet. I think my results should be fairly similar to the experiment I modeled my research after, with a little variation due to geographic region. When I finish data collection, I will be using a stats program (SPSS) to run backward stepwise logistic regression. 

I have also done some writing. I have a good chunk of the background and history done as well as some of the methods section written. 

On to the photos...

It's been so hot that livers placed in the sun cook. That doesn't seem to stop the flies though. They happily lay eggs anyway. This piece of liver got up to 104 degrees. It smells horrid too. 

A mound of eggs.

The livers are half covered with a damp paper towel to keep them from drying out. The flies lay tons of eggs under the paper towels.

Laying eggs. 

Sometimes, there are so many flies that I can hear them before I get to the site. They swarm everywhere when I remove the cover and fly about my head while I am trying to take measurements. I've been having some issues with hornets too. They aren't there for the liver so much as they are there to eat the flies. 

If you look to the right of this photo, you can just see a black striped fly with orangish-red eyes. Most of the flies I have been seeing on the livers are blow and bottle flies from the family Calliphoridae. They lay eggs. The striped fly is a flesh fly from the family Sarcophagidae and lays live young. It's a red-tailed flesh fly. I have a photo of the live young somewhere, but I can't find it right now. 

More eggs. 

They lay in holes and crevices first. 

There are eggs all along the seam of this piece of liver. 

I put one of my collection sites under a horse chestnut tree. This is a flower crab spider. They closely resemble the blossoms on the horse chestnut tree and use them as camouflage. It dropped down and swiped one of my flies. 

Flower crab spider

More eggs