Greetings from the confines of my office!  I have not posted in over a month but lucky for you, the other bloggers have kept you entertained with Alligator vomit, post-quals stress disorder and the joys of working with carcinogens, flammable materials and high-voltage equipment.  If those don't make you want to be a graduate student and/or scientist, then I don't know what will!

So what have I been doing?  A whole lot of non-exciting blogging material like processing DIDSON videos, analyzing data, and preparing for conferences.  The good news is now I have some results to share!  

One of the most interesting and surprising things I've found in my DIDSON videos is schools of small prey fish (< 12 cm).  Not just one or two on occasion, but nearly every time I go out, in all three of the canals I work in, there are schools.   

It's been fascinating to see such a variety of schools.  As far as I know, Everglades' scientists were unaware prey fish were using these canals so prolifically and behaving this way.  Schooling is often times a behavior prey fish employ to avoid being preyed upon by larger fish.  They also school for other reasons (foraging, reproducing), so my next step is to describe, quantitatively, the shape and size of these schools to show this is an anti-predator defense.

For those of you who read Using "Sound" to See Underwater and Everglades at Night,  you've learned a bit about the DIDSON (an imaging sonar) and have gathered that some of my work occurs at night in the glades.  Below, I'll explain how I'm using the DIDSON to understand the role of predatory fish in canals of the Everglades.

Canals were dredged  in the early 20th century to drain the wetlands and have now become a permanent fixture in the Everglades landscape.  I could write a whole separate article on the harm canals have done, but for now I encourage you to read The Effects of Canals and Levees on Everglades Ecosystems for a review on their history and role in the landscape.  Their relevance to my study is that the canals harbor large, piscivorous fish (fish that eat other fish), which is great for recreational fishermen but bad news for the little fish who have to fight for survival in these canals.  Small fish play a very important role in the Everglades, serving as an critical food source for wading birds.  As you can see in the video below and infer from the word "wading", these birds hunt for fish in shallow bodies of water.  They may not be successful hunters in deep canals.