Been in Maine for the last week. The first couple days were beautiful and sunny, but now it's been raining for three days straight. I've been getting a lot of field work done. Behold:

This picture sums up what I'm working on at the moment. My hypothesis is that the loose seaweed fragments that wash up on shore provide an important food source for, among other animals, snails. Voila! You see the snails here NOMing the seaweed. I spent the first 3 days of the trip tagging pieces of seaweed ad nauseum (see red tags; 2 tags in case 1 falls off). I will be checking up on them weekly to see how long they stick around. And the last 3 days I've been collecting, painting, and releasing snails back to my sites so I can compare growth rates. Hopefully the sites with the most seaweed fragments have the fastest snail growth rates (as I found in my preliminary measurements on the island in 2007).