Who Is This?

After a nice week off from research, I returned to the lab to start the macrofauna counting and biomass processes. Since we don't work with macrofauna in our lab, I was unsure how to tackle this stage of my research but I hoped that the meiofauna methods would translate to macrofauna. Thank goodness they did; I dumped all the samples into the 100-grid counting dishes we use and went through each sample to count and extract any and all macrofauna. However, since my experience with macrofauna is nearly non-existent, I decided to count and extract any organisms I immediately recognized as animals, any animal larvae, and anything I couldn't identify, but I knew wasn't sediment or plant material. While extracting extra organisms (or non-organisms) can obscure the initial macrofauna counts, I will have to readjust the counts once I have identified everything I extracted, so extra material won't be a hinderance. It is also better to do extra work now and ensure higher quality data than to ignore some unknowns and write them off as irrelevancies. 

---