What's Next?

We definitely need to develop a more formal relationship between WSC and UVI and possibly with Good Hope School. Maybe I could recruit Good Hope HS students to attend WSC.

Our next expedition is scheduled for 31 July to 14 August 2009. During that trip I have agreed to provide a seminar to UVI as per my discussion with Marcia Taylor. Maybe we can figure out a way for Steve Brewer to give a seminar as well.

I need to find a source of funding to hire Russ Slatton and Brian Daley to develop a high-resolution geo-referenced vegetation map for SPNWR.That may be more efficient than trying to have students create such a project. Such a project would compliment some good vegetation transects.

Katie opened the stomach of the mongoose that was dead in the trap and found chicken feet and rat fur. I am looking forward to having a Chad conduct a dietary analysis of mongoose this summer. We need to look into getting a portable microscope (possibly a digital scope) that we can take with us and use at the Refuge.

Another interesting project would be to surgically implant a temperature monitor in the abdominal cavities of these animals and build a cage at the refuge to keep them in so that we could get some daily temperature data. Of course, the ideal system would be to develop the software/hardware to place on free-roaming animals. Maybe Mark Corner and crew would be interested in such a project.

It seems to me that the dietary analysis combined with body temperature data would provide us with some really cool data to model the energy budgets of mongoose dem. That sounds like a good project for Tom Hoogendyk to work on given his background in physiology and mathematics. I also need to go back and reread James Brown's paper on the cost of being long and thin (metabolism of weasels) for some ideas.

Katie and I also discussed capturing images of mongoose feet and using NIH image to analyze foot symmetry. We might be able to "footprint" mongoose after we anesthetize them.