Fun with Dung!

Hello!

With three grueling days of field work in the hot South African sun, we have collected all our data and are ready to analyze! My group was interested in studying the possible effects of stream order on large mammal distribution and abundance. Stream order is a mathematical classification for river systems and the faculty and their colleagues are trying to assess whether that mathematical classification has any biological significance. In order to do this, we sampled 8 different streams and counted dung and tracks along different transects at each stream. While counting dung might sound a little….well, strange, it was actually a fantastic project! Every day we went out with our faculty advisor and a game guard. Our game guard, Phillip, was our savior when it came to identifying the tracks and dung of different species. It was wonderful to learn so much from someone who grew up in the bush and had so many stories to tell! The people here are so friendly and full of joy, it’s impossible not to be happy here and listen to their stories! The next few days we will be analyzing our data and writing a full scientific paper on our research! We’ll also be going on our first game drive tomorrow morning, so we’re all ready to see some amazing African animals!

Until then, enjoy these pictures of a pair of lions resting in the shade , some baboons wandering casually along the road , and a spectacular rare eagle we have yet to definitively identify

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 12th, 2012 at 9:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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