Project

My Masters degree continues. My average for this, my third unversity degree, is 8.14. That's not too shabby considering my past attempts at learning something. I guess that this marine biology crap really does agree with me. Today I've been going over the data I've managed to collect so far about the animal communities between 240 - 374 meters. interestingly, my hypothesis seems to hold true so far. There does seem to be a connection between the type of substrate and both abundance and diversity of animals on the bottom. If ican show this is true for many types of substrate then I can go on to suggest that the type of substrate can be used to estimate what kinds of animals are present and in what abundance anywhere around Iceland. That would be pretty cool. Here's a picture:
As you can see by the four curved lines, the number of species found increases faster and to a higher maximum on a stoney bottom than on a muddy bottom. This is not really much news in the scientific world, but for my prject I had to show that there is an association in order to continue to the step of showing what species are characteristic of each substrate type. This is a trick ecologists use for the purpose of surveying areas too huge to be surveyed directly. Hopefully I'll get a whole bunch more data this summer so that I can get a very clear picture of things.