San Salvador Island, 2017
(Photo: James Beech)
(Photo: James Beech)
INTRODUCTIONSan Salvador ScienceThis project began in the summer of 2017 at the Gerace Research Centre on San Salvador Island in the Bahamas. Working with Prof. Michal Kowalewski and Dr. Troy Dexter, I collected around twenty land crabs of vary sizes and several hundred terrestrial snails. To better understand the predator-prey interactions of these taxa and how these might bias the fossil record, I brought the crabs and snails together in a laboratory setting and recorded the details of all instances of predation.
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METHODSMultivariate AnalysesFor this project, I set out to analyze the data I'd brought back from San Salvador using various multivariate techniques in R.
So far I have begun to explore this data set through correlation analysis, principle component analysis, cluster analysis, and discriminant analysis. |
For this experiment, twenty land crabs were fed terrestrial snails of two different kinds
over a period of several days. All attacks on snails were recorded, along with the time the attack was discovered, the size and species of both prey and predator, and the degree and kind of damage to the snail’s shell. Three hundred and forty-four attacks were recorded in all. To better understand these findings, I turned to multivariate analysis and the programming language R, and some interesting patterns began to emerge. |