Cycles, vacation, and my brief absence

My job is very cyclical. As previously discussed, I am heavily dependent on the tides to determine when I need to go out in the field and get animals for my work. There really isn't much leeway in when the tides will be good, which means that for at least one week out of the month, I have to plan to do as much collecting work as possible (especially in the summer). It also means that when I get up on a collecting morning and it is too early or rainy or unbearably hot or there might be too much traffic because of a holiday weekend, I don't really get to go back to sleep.

On top of that is added the reproductive cycle of the snails. I am lucky in that Crepidula reproduce for a very large window of time, at least in my location. I can reliably find field-collected larvae to work with from April/May until October. This is in sharp contrast with, say, coral reproduction, which is frequently centered on just a single night of the year (and woe betide the researcher who misses that night). Perhaps a post on synchrony in corals is something I will do in the future.

Still, despite this thankfully broad window to work with, I find myself running around doing half-a-dozen different experiments every summer, trying to capitalize on the field season as much as possible. And, of course, the academic calendar does not line up perfectly with the animals, meaning that in both spring and fall there is a painful period where I am doing both my academic and my field work.

None of that is to justify why it has been a month since I posted, though. It turns out that the last couple weeks looked something like this:

One of my field sites, mid-June, while I was deploying an experiment.

Snowbird, Utah, site of the 2013 Evolution meeting, taken < 24 hours after the previous picture.

Zion National Park, Utah.

Yes, I took a glorious week off to go west (don't panic, I had an experiment running itself while I was away). Both the scientific meeting and the brief vacation afterwards were glorious, but mostly invertebrate-free. Actually, that's a complete lie, since we saw many beautiful insects in both the mountains and the deserts, but no marine invertebrates. I was disappointed not to see a tarantula or scorpion in the desert, but that's pretty easy to say from the comfort of my couch. And there were no snails spotted in the mountains, though I did see a single freshwater snail in a reservoir near Zion.

When I returned to the humid Northeast, I found my snails in good condition, so I'm getting painfully back to the grind, trying to get as much done as I can before the academic year cycles back around again.