Draft X+

I'm laughing because my last blog post says I was on draft 5 of my thesis. I stopped numbering them at X. It's now just called Boswell Thesis Draft. It's 123 pages long with photos and appendices. Keeping the page numbers straight for the table of contents and tables and figures pages is fun, not. Bonus, I finally figured how to use page breaks. In your face, Word!

I just finished a new round of revisions and sent the draft to my thesis committee. I've applied to graduate at the end of winter quarter (3/23) and my thesis is due 3/4. Cross your fingers!

I can't decide if I should keep my maiden name on there or not. There is someone with my same name out there who publishes a bunch. I didn't include it on my degree application. 

And no one told me that while writing a thesis is really hard, writing the acknowledgements section is even harder. Cries...for real. 

Also, I asked a former grad student if there was a template for the defense PowerPoint and he laughed, a lot. Fabulous.

I need to get my resume out and dust it off, because I'm gonna be looking for a job pretty soon.

Still swimming...

I'm still working on my thesis writing. I know!!! I should be done by now!!! I really want to be!!! 

I have a committee chair now and a second committee member, but I don't have a third yet. Unfortunately, I'm finding that it is really difficult to communicate with my committee members long distance. 

I am on my 5th draft. I like to write for awhile, note where I need to make edits, save and start a new draft with the edits. I've been fighting with my stats for awhile, but I think I have things figured out. Maybe. I keep going back to the stats and running them again. I've watched a billion videos on logistic regression and how to interpret the results. I took stats and I grad TA-ed a software-based stats class, but I still feel like I don't know what I'm doing. 

This is my brain. I might have a sticky note problem. 

And my journal article binder. Yes, I printed all of them out. I need to be able to take notes directly on the article. I just can't read them on a computer.

Last week, I went through all the photos I took during data collection. I found insects I didn't see when I took the pictures. There were several photos of red-tailed flesh flies and its larva, Asian lady beetle larva, a black soldier fly and a leaf-eating beetle. I had to use my bug id skills, several books and the internet to figure out what they all were. My youngest son helped. 

Here's a crab spider eating flies in my bait bowl. 

I have tons of pictures of egg masses. Gross, but that's the evidence of colonization I needed. 

Fly on egg mass

Look at the neat rows of eggs.

Hidden in a vein. 

I wrote a draft.

As I wrote in my last blog post, my thesis advisor and committee chair Joan passed away in December. Since then, I have not chosen a new advisor nor have I been assigned one as of yet. I spoke to the 2nd member of my committee and the anthropology department grad advisor and she asked me to send her a draft with what I have done so far. Then, they can decide which professor would be the appropriate choice based on how stats heavy my research might be. (It's not stats heavy, but there are enough.) That panicked motivated me to write and I sent in a VERY rough draft last Friday. I haven't heard back from her yet. She's probably trying to figure out something, anything nice to say.

I've been working on organizing my sources. I have this little table next to my desk that I keep all my reference material on. I like to print out articles (yes, I am a tree killer, but I promise I will never throw them away.) so I can make notes on them directly. I have one binder for articles and one for drafts, stats, outlines etc. 

I discovered that I somehow deleted my working bibliography from Zotero (my research organization software). I still can't figure out how I did that. I have a print copy of it and I cite as I go, so it's not too big of a deal, it's just annoying. 

While I was organizing, I found a photo from one of the last days of data collection in my thesis folder. I think it was raining that day.***

I also found this...

My daughter (15 years old) wanted to go somewhere, but I had to work on my thesis data collection. She told me she'd finish my thesis for me. "There, it's done."  

Yay! It needs a little editing, but it looks good to me. :) 

JS

My thesis committee chair and advisor, Dr. Joan Stevenson, passed away Monday night.

Joan was one of those people who made an impact on everyone she met. She was brilliant. She taught me so much and there was still so much more I could have learned from her. She had amazing style and accessorized with panache. She had a dry sense of humor and a sarcastic wit. She made me laugh and even when she struggled, she was able to laugh at herself. She had a huge heart. She encouraged and yes, pushed us with love and patience. (I’m probably not the only one who will always hear her voice in their head when writing.)

Joan was the one who steered me towards forensic entomology and was more excited than I was when I found a gap in the literature that would lead to my thesis topic. She told me I could when I didn't think I was capable. You really have no choice but to believe in yourself when someone like Joan believes in you. She once wrote in an email after a presentation that she was impressed with me and that it was an honor and a privilege so far, but no, it was MY honor and privilege to have known Joan. 

Predation, yellow jackets....

I'm more than 2/3rds done with my data collection. I need to work on my writing and start going through the data. 

Hornets are still an issue, but there seems to be less of them and more yellow jackets. There are days when no colonization happens at all and I know it's because the hornets and yellow jackets are eating the flies or keeping them from laying eggs. My data collection site under the tall trees swarms with yellow jackets. Sometimes it's difficult to get in there to check the thermometer and look for colonization. 

It's very hot this week and slightly windy. We expect to have temps in the 100s by the end of the week.

As usual, pics of bugs, liver and eggs to follow...

Yellow jacket. 

Yellow jackets like liver. Nom, nom!  

Yay, colonization! 

The liver gets fairly dried out, especially the liver at the site in the grass. It doesn't seem to affect colonization. 

More colonization

Under the liver on the bottom of the bowl, there are holes to let liquid drain. The flies use them to lay eggs under the liver. 

This happened again and the basket was weighted down. I don't think it was a raven. They still hang around, but something else happened that makes me think it was either a raccoon or a large house cat/small wildcat. 

Three of our roosters and our duck (her name was Pip and she was a wonderful duck) were killed and eaten in our yard. My daughter heard something in the yard several nights last week, but we couldn't see anything. Then, she woke me up at 3:00 in the morning because one of our chickens was screaming. Something had her in the brush. I went out on the balcony above it and yelled. It let her go.  She ran off. to hide in the plum trees on the other side of the yard. It must have run the other way and I never saw it. My boys chased it towards our pond where they saw glowing eyes that were too high off the ground to be a house cat, but it got away. That poor chicken is injured and it's still too soon to tell if she will recover fully, but she is up and walking around. I think she needs therapy. "It" hasn't come back that we know of. We've redoubled our efforts to keep the chickens and geese safe at night. Long story short. Something is eating my birds and my livers. 

Nature 6 Heather 0

I feel like I am trying to collect data in the midst of plagues. First, there were the hornets and now it's ravens. What's next? Frogs? Flood? 

A couple of days ago, I put out livers at my collection sites and went back about 90 minutes later to check them. I discovered that one of my sites was ransacked by a raven. My third son heard it cawing outside and texted me, but I didn't go check. There's always birds outside. My husband saw a raven flying around, but again, there are always birds flying around. We often have hawks, vultures and even a pair of duck stealing bald eagles in the trees around the house. Grey herons drink from our pond. The roosters are always cock-a-doodle doo-ing. Bird noises outside aren't abnormal. I should have gone to see what was going on. 

I wasn't using tent stakes or weighting the baskets because they are on our land and nothing has bothered them up to this point. My chickens and even the geese leave the baskets alone. But, ravens are pretty smart and now I have to weigh the baskets down. I did that the next day. 

Challenge accepted, said the raven  It simply used its bill to pull the bowl containing the liver to the side of the basket and pulled the liver through the squares on the side. I go to check the site, which looks undisturbed and the liver is gone!

 My low-tech solution, which seems to be working thus far, is to add another basket on top of the first and twist it so that the rectangle holes in the basket are smaller. Then I add a weight to the top of the baskets so they can't be picked up and moved. And I am also watching out the window like Elmer Fudd hunting Bugs Bunny. 

There isn't as much colonization happening because of the hornets, but I've found that if I create orifices in the liver, it gives the flies some place to hide and lay eggs. Most days, I get some data from at least one or two of my three sites. Here's some photos...

Add yellow jackets to the list of plagues that have already occurred. Fortunately, so far, there haven't been too many of them and they are happily eating the liver. They do fly out when I lift the basket and circle my head. I spritz them with water and they mostly leave me alone. It won't be long. I'm sure before I write in my blog that I've been stung by a yellow jacket or a hornet.  Not looking forward to that. 

Hornets!

Hornets are definitely going to be an issue in my data collection. Not only am I having to fight them to even look for fly eggs, I think they are keeping the flies from laying eggs at all by eating them before they get a chance to.  The more hornets there are flying around my data collection sites, the less flies I see and therefore there's less or no eggs.  

I need to search the literature to see if there is any research on this. Hornets are most likely present on human remains as well and  there presence would be an additional variable in estimating the postmortem interval. 

I keep trying to get photos of the hornets, but they won't hold still and I have to dodge them the entire time. This was the only photo I could get today that wasn't blurry. It's a bald-faced hornet. (AKA bald hornet, white-faced hornet, white-tailed hornet, spruce wasp, blackjacket and bull wasp)

I took a photo of the carnage. All that's left of this fly is a wing and some legs. Ick.