Childress Lab Field Research Blog

As promised here are some pictures of our first site release. The first step was to catch all the lobsters out of our mesocosm using hand nets and tickle sticks. The tickle sticks are a great tool that we use to help walk our lobsters into our nets.













Then, the lobsters were loaded into a cooler and placed on the Parker. We drove out to our first experimental site, which was where we set up our transect the previous day. Each lobster was removed from the boat and gently placed into or near a shelter. Both artificial and natural shelters were used. To observe the denning behavior and dispersal of resident lobsters, we also tagged lobsters that were already on the site. These were lobsters that were not used previously in our experiment, but happened to be utilizing shelters within our site. During the next week, we will be checking the site daily to see where our lobsters are!