Tuesday 2/2/2021, 9 am
I walked with Ross, from 9:05-11:00 am
We documented all newts on the road with pre-numbered flags. These newts died after Saturday morning, when we last checked the area. We set one flag per newt, even when there were a few newt next to each other. We added notes on the flags - edge/ center/ divide to help us find which one is which.
We documented 127 new newts. We have decided not to mark any more newts. We will only check existing flags.
We saw newts mating in the little pool near limekiln trailhead! I saw water there for the first time this year last week. On Saturday there were tree frogs calling there, I didn't see any newts.
The weather was ok, not too cold, with some rain from time to time. Most newt still had their colors, even though quite a few of them were already disintegrating. We marked everything that could be identified as a newt at this point.
Very quiet - Traffic: 11 trucks, 19 cars, 2 bikes, about 10 parked cars on the road.
Comments
@merav, do these need to go in the main 2020-2021 project as well as in the Longevity Project? It seems you're doing that for the first survey in each experiment, but not this one.
The first observations of the flagged individuals should go into the 2020-2021 project, as they were part of Stacie's survey. So that all observations Stacie made on Wednesday 9 am should be part of that. All other newts I observed later, and had no flags, are not part of the official survey. They will be added into the 2020-2021 project if they would still be there on Saturday for the regular survey. I wonder if we should add them into the longevity project or into something else?
This is how I understand this issue:
If you're trying to simulate what happens between normal surveys, then your photos of those extras that don't have flags won't ever go into either project. Since you're not adding new newts to the Longevity Study once an experiment begins, they don't belong there. On Saturday, whoever does the regular survey will photograph everything that doesn't have a flag and include those photos in the main 2020-2021 survey. Even if the new newts you photograph between Tues/Wed and Sat are still there on Saturday, your photos shouldn't go into the main project, because it would represent a duplicate of a roadkill newt catalogued by the Sat surveyor.
It seems to just confuse things to have those photos of "new" newts that show up between the beginning and end of an experiment.
so what do you think we should do with them? I think they need to be somewhere, in case we'll decide to use them later
I don't know. I ran into the same problem with some of my observations on that one day I was out counting newts.
Maybe they should be handled the same way as the newts without flags - put them in the Longevity Study, but don't track them over time and don't include them in the stats? Add them to the bottom of the appropriate spreadsheet & column and give them a unique ID so we can find them later?
Doesn't seem like a good solution, but I don't know what else to do.
maybe we should only add them to the Longevity project, with all the trouble of assigning numbers. If we ever need these numbers, we could do it then. What do you think?
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