Life intrudes

When I'm lecturing, or grading papers, or sitting in a meeting, or advising students, or working with data, I find myself thinking how nice it would be to have the time to just sit down and write. Of course, when those rare moments come that I don't have anything sitting on my desk that needs to be done yesterday, all I want to do is vegetate. Those moments always seem to come on a Friday afternoon, when the week is basically done and the next class or meeting or student is two days away. Usually, I wind up bugging out. Maybe I can force myself to spend a little time bringing this up to date.

For the last year (fourteen months, actually), my colleagues and I have been engaged in a project (funded in part by funds that BP threw at Gulf Coast research institutions) examining the impact of the Deepwater Horizon spill on intertidal salt marshes in coastal Alabama. We've been working at Point aux Pins, which protrudes southward into Mississippi Sound from the Alabama mainland near Bayou La Batre.  In the image, that's Bayou La Batre to the east, Point aux Poins to the west.  NOAA imagery from the Summer of 2010 indicated a degree of oiling on the eastern side of the Point, but not on the western side.  We proposed to set up ecologically similar stations at the two locations, in an attempt to determine the impact of the oiling.  Very ambitious study.  We proposed to build tidally flooded weirs to look at macrofauna, collect meiofaunal cores which we would subsample for microbial analyses, do above- and below-ground biomass studies on Spartina.  We were fortunate enough to get some funding, and started building weirs in December 2010.  We began collecting samples in January, and continued throughout the year. 

Well, we're starting to look at the data now.  Very interesting stuff, although we're not sure what it says yet about oil impacts.  Suffice to say, though, that we're getting a nice picture of the ecology of this salt marsh system.  Reward enough of its own.  The greatest reward is simply the opportunity to get back into the field. 

A few months into the project, a graduate student here at Small Southern approached me about getting involved.  She made a couple of trips down, collected some fish with me, and decided that she wanted to do her thesis on the fish communities utilizing the marsh (not a part of our original proposal).  So, for the last nine months or so we've been sampling fish assemblages at our two sites, along with collecting environmental data.  That story's looking pretty interesting, too.  More to come.