Saturday: Made it up to Uni just before 9am. On the bus met another girl going on the field trip, Luisa. Met a few more people on the 3 hour bus ride (alright and took a nap too.) Arrived at the Worms Head Hotel, got changed, and headed straight outside to get working... in POURING rain. sigh, it is Wales afterall. We went from collecting random bus to practicint island biogeography theory by lifting up rocks and counting species underneath, to checking Gorse flowers (gorse is this prickly yellow bush) for the presence of moth larvae. Very wet and cold from the neverending wind, we had a chance to change before dinner, and afterwards we had a seminar session going over the day and expectations for the course.
Sunday: Set off on our longest walk of the trip a bit after 9. A lovely day despite the damn wind. We headed up the gower head, looked at some dung beetles, thought of possible projects, walked further and disccussed different lichens. Walked down through a caravan park into the sandy dunes for our pack lunch. Explored in the sand dunes catching snails to examine polymorphisms in shell banding at 2 sites. My group, Louisa and Sarah (biologists) and Georginia (natural sciences) decided on our project to go to anvils that thrushes use to crack open snail shells to see if the proportions of shells of various banding patterns is the same at all anvils. A 40 min walk back along the beach to examine life on a vertical rocky shore: lichens, barnacles, agi, molluscs, etc. After class that evening, we all went to hang out in the bar a the hotel - the only bar in town. Soon became a place for us to meet, do our work, and get a beer before the evening seminar. I did kindof enjoy being the only, somewhat random, foreign student with 18 English students, and several English profs. I'm sure they enjoyed giving me crap about it, but I got a kick hearing all the random stereotypes and it was all in good fun.
Monday: A short drive to three Cliffs Bay for exercises in the woodlands and coast. In the woods we did some symmetry measurements on wild grlic leaves, spent time looking for cool bus, and did an experiment to determine the % male and female that a buttercup population is. Hiked up, stopped at a ruined castle for lunch and to practice a bit of fractal dimensons. On the beach we tested habituation in edible periwinkles and took data to test for randomness in the number of small snails living in dead barnacle shells. A lovely hike back over rocks, the sun finally came out and I was even wearing short sleeves for a bit!
Tuesday-Thursday: These days we were working on our group projects. We had the longest walk of any group, all the way to the sandy dunes. But it was quite fun to scramble around them looking for anvils and finding all sorts of random things. I ended up making 1 pound 30 plus a credit card, and George found a pretty nice football. Anyway, Wednesday night we did number crunching and worked on finishing our paper. Thursday morning were our 12 min group presentations. Went off without a hitch, and we handed in our group paper and individual report on class exercises just before getting on the bus back to Bath. An entire course done! Arrived back at Uni at 4pm, just enough time to repack and catch my 7:30 flight to Edinburgh.....
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