Got crabs? ;)

Yesterday, Anna-Mai and I went out on the beach at low tide to search for Hemigrapsus oregonensis aka the green shore crab. Of course it was raining (thanks, Washington), so we had to suit up in giant yellow rain coats. I have included a picture of me here for your viewing pleasure. Unfortunatley, due to the rain, I couldn't take the camera with me to capture the action of the hunt.




















We grabbed a bucket and made our way down to the beach. All we had to do was start turning over rocks and grab any green crab we saw. Sounds easy, right? Not so much. Not only do you have to bend over/kneel while trying not to fall over on the rocks (which can be pretty tiring for your legs), but you have to turn over every rock (of which there are thousands!), grab the crab before it can scurry away, identify its gender, and check for eggs if it is female and put it in the bucket while it is trying to escape. And to top it all off, we did this in the rain. It took a while and the help of two other interns that joined us, but we eventually found 10 egg bearing females. Here's what we were looking for:

The black, spongy looking part on the abdomen is the eggs.

Also, these crabs range in size from a fingertip to a the pip from the middle of a peach, so at times they were hard to catch. Also, there seemed to be an abundance of males, which we didn't want.

After we collected the crabs, we took them back to the lab and looked at some eggs from each individual under the microscope to see how developed they are. It looks like two will hatch next week! Soon we will have larvae and will be able to start our experiment.

Yesterday was FUN, but very tiring. Also, I stayed up kind of late watching a movie with some friends I've made here so I slept in until 10am this morning. Oops. It's kind of nice to have the weekend off and relax, though. I need to catch up on sleep and some of the reading my advisor gave me to do.