Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Fieldwork on the wrong side of 100 degrees F






It's baby season at SRS!

We have been seeing more and more herp babies and also catching some animals in ways not expected. Note the fence lizard in the sherman. We had a broadhead in a sherman as well!







Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge (MNWR), North Carolina

Hi there!
 The mosquitoes are what you might call fierce. We go in fully armored and still barely come out alive.
The bear seem to enjoy helping us rearrange our arrays. They took down several burlaps and chewed up a few coverboards.


Burlap ransacking culprit!



Sunday, July 24, 2011

Arenas, in the humid woods of TN

We have installed our arenas for future host preference experiments. Perhaps the most memorable part of the process was bringing the IACUC review committee out into the mosquito-infested poison ivy to check them, on an afternoon when the heat index was hovering around 105F...

More ticks on skinks (in the TN lab this time)

Here are some more photos of tick on skinks - these guys are participating in Rick and Cathy's Blood Meal Analysis (BMA)validation trials. Hopefully the Reverse Line Blot will show these ticks did indeed feed on lizards and not, say, wombats!