My Journey as a Primary Science Fellow: Meeting up with Ellie (another teacher fellow)

9 May

Today I went to Ocean Beach to catch up with Ellie. She is another teacher fellow from Christchurch. She is studying Pingao plants in the sand dunes. I thought I could give her a hand then take her into Havelock North and maybe show her here at PFR.

She was with a Masters student that she had been working with at Lincoln. He was looking at analysing the terrain using a drone service to give a 2D visual representation. He had a GPS device and an incline measurer, which he could use as well at ground level. From what he was recording on the ground and what the drone gave he should be able to give an accurate 3D image.

When I joined them they told me they were looking for Katipo spider. I always thought they lived in drift wood and not here. But I was proven wrong. Ellie and Mike had mapped out a 200m x 5m transection from the beach inland. Then they recorded the plant life with GPS coordinates and measured the height, width and depth of each plant, whether they were a single plant or a group of plants, and the incline of the sand dune. They only did this for a 5x5m plot. This became a representation of the whole transaction. Once that was done they then checked every plant for katipo spider, recording each one they found with their sex, their plant host details, their web structure, and their GPS location. They weren’t finding many but they were definitely finding some. In their first transect they found 6 katipo.

Marking out the transection.

Recording all the plants living in a 5m square.
While Mike measures the size of the plants and the incline of the land,
Ellie uses a GPS unit to record its location.