Comments on: The New Predator Experiment

By: WFSU In the Grass, On the Reef

WFSU In the Grass, On the Reef — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 09:57:11 +0000

[...] research. This past winter, I spent many weeks processing various frozen components of great cage experiment of last summer, including the several hundred spat tiles placed inside the different cages at all [...]

By: WFSU | Public Media, PBS, and NPR for Northern Florida and Southern Georgia

WFSU | Public Media, PBS, and NPR for Northern Florida and Southern Georgia — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:04:44 +0000

[...] is a series of images from our caging experiment last summer, which you can read about here. Our large cages contained [...]

By: WFSU | Public Media, PBS, and NPR for Northern Florida and Southern Georgia

WFSU | Public Media, PBS, and NPR for Northern Florida and Southern Georgia — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 12:42:15 +0000

[...] an explanation of the experiment and all of its parts, click here. That's one way to retrieve a minnow trap! Dr. Jeb Byers untangles this trap from the propellor [...]

By: Oyster Study: Year Two, Under Way in a Big Way |

Oyster Study: Year Two, Under Way in a Big Way | — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 16:45:45 +0000

[...] year later and David & co. are preparing an intensive experiment (described in detail by David earlier) to kick off year two. It’s a far cry from last May, when we saw David, by himself, figure [...]

By: John Carroll

John Carroll — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 06:07:25 +0000

Sounds exciting! Although I agree with your lab that it also sounds like a lot of work! Some of your crab predators are also oyster predators, so are you going to have some treatments with oysters and the higher order predator, so you can get a baseline for their oyster consumption? This way, you can use an additive multiple predator effect design to predict what your oyster consumption should be (based on the mud crabs and the higher predators alone) and see what it actually is when they are together, and this would help solidify the argument of risk reduction of the oyster prey in the presence of your higher predator.
Also, something I am going to try out up here this summer, and maybe you have thought of this, is to use lobster wire to build cage enclosures that allow free movement of the mud crab mesopredators, but that include or exclude the higher order predator (which I also plan to use toadfish and blue crabs). This way, and maybe I am wrong, you could have your reefs with higher order predators, and the mud crabs are free to colonize or not colonize the reefs, and you can compare reefs with predators present vs. predators absent on naturally “recruiting” mud crab abundances, and resultant survival of the oysters. Then again, this may or may not be useful, but just something that has been bouncing around in my head for my eelgrass-scallop stuff up here.