What if a random herd of cows eats my entire project?

I don't want to look like this next September.

I feel like a huge hypocrite right now. I have spent countless hours researching, reading and blogging about natural experiments and droning on and on about how important and valuable they are. Now, as it seems, my M.Sc. research project is going to be a massive manipulation study. As much as I and my supervisor don’t like manipulation studies it seems like it has to be done. It’s the obvious next step following my undergrad thesis.

This whole situation has brought me to thinking about why I don’t like manipulation studies and experimental set-ups to begin with. The truth is I don’t hate them. In fact, most of the popular and innovative science of both the past and today has come from these manipulations. So why am I so hesitant to design and implement a vegetation manipulation study? I think it’s mostly fear. I am afraid that things just won’t work out.

Those pesky cows. They look so sweet don't they?

Why am I scared? Seriously? It’s a science experiment...with plants. It’s not a haunted house. I believe a lot of the fear stems from horror stories. My supervisor has told me stories of countless experiments gone horribly wrong. For example: you spend hours setting up a grazing experiment where you put up fences to stop deer from eating vegetation. You come back to sample vegetation at the end of the summer only to find that a deer got its antlers caught in the fence, tore the thing down, and cleared the entire plot. I have also been told about thesis students growing plants in the greenhouse. They start with 30 species and end with three because they wouldn’t germinate, got diseases or simply just didn’t grow. And then there’s my absolute favourite and yet the most terrifying story of all time—an experimental set-up gone horribly wrong—which I witnessed firsthand. Two summers ago we spent a solid two weeks marking out hundreds of plots and sampling and ID’ing all the species in a massive field. We were prepping the field for a long term ten year water study. We left the field Friday afternoon and returned Monday morning only to find that 70 cows had found our field, eaten the entire thing and pulled the flags out the ground. So all of our hard work was shit on...literally.

Field work for my Honours thesis-Summer 2009 Photo Credit:SLD

These stories among many others scare me. What if a random herd of cows eats my entire project? What if something goes horribly wrong? When I did my field work for my Honours thesis it was a natural experiment. I just threw down random 1 x 1m plots in an old abandoned field and collected the largest and smallest reproductive individuals of each species. If there was a disease outbreak (which there was in one field) we just found another field and moved on. Now I am planning on targeting individuals and caging them, removing competition and obtaining a maximum size for each species. There is a lot more that could go wrong here.

What can I do? I guess I just have to troubleshoot things and anticipate what could go wrong before I get to work in April. One thing that makes sense is that to see a good trend, as evidenced by my Honours thesis, you need about ten individuals per species. So, if I target 40 individuals at the outset the chances are that even without caging them, at least 10 individuals would remain in the end and be useful for data analysis. Moreover, maximizing the number of fields used will also help because if there is a disease outbreak, I won’t lose all of my individuals, only a fraction of them.

I'll watch out for Frank this summer.

So maybe this whole manipulation thing isn’t a horrible idea after all. I mean, manipulations ARE useful. They let us see trends that you just can’t see naturally. And in this case it’s necessary. I have done everything that I could do naturally, and now the next step is a manipulation. I think this has made me realize the importance of multiple empirical and experimental approaches in science, which was alluded to a few posts ago. If you have a topic with as many possibilities as “plant body size and reproductive size threshold” you can’t focus on one specific kind of approach. Using multiple approaches will allow both a thorough investigation and the ability to contrast results between techniques.

As long as I plan I think I’ll be ok. I know my study seems a bit blurry right now, but I think I’ll blog about that next time. Here’s to hoping nothing tramples, eats or shits on my project!