With Cory's shearwater already around Corvo Island and taking into account the results we had last year on the predation of eggs and juveniles, for this year we are trying a new approach to study the impact of rodents in the reproduction of Shearwater.
Why cooking science??
Because that is what we got up to yesterday afternoon, as you can see from the photos. If we wrote an article about the scientific activity of yesterday, the keywords would be made paraffin, chocolate, bath, pan and cuvettes for making ice.
In order to understand the activity of the rodent community around the Cory's colonies of Corvo, we will make grids of wax blocks. Just as a little note, we will build any wax wall around the Cory's colonies. In recent years this technique has been increasingly used to study the activity of rodents. On one hand the results have been very useful and this approach has been revealing to estimate accurate abundances of rodents, the other is a low-cost technique.
In practice this technique consist in put on field small pieces of wax (with attractive for rodents - in our case was chocolate) as a pre-defined grid. After a few days all the cubes are removed and examined in order to account for the marks left by rodent bites. As each species of rodent has a characteristic dentition structure, it is still possible to know which species occur around the study areas.
Looking forward to overcome some limitations that arose last year in this part of the project.
Keep tuned!
Regards.
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