Zoology Field Course to Dale Fort

Being stuck out in the middle of no where with no phone reception when in bed and wifi that crashes when any more than 3 people wish to log on is hardly what I would have considered fun when we were told that we, Leeds 2nd Year Zoologists, had a compulsory field course to a small town called Dale in Wales at least a 20 minute drive from civilization and if I'm honest I still cant say that the majority of the trip was a barrel of laughs either. After arriving after a 8 hour coach journey and being told we had a 20 minute walk to the Fort as buses were unable to drive there the trip wasn't of to the best start.

I found a baby crab

 The first day we had lecturer Ian Hope. I LOVED the stuff we got to do with him, a lot of people didn't seem as bothered but I got to create life!. I personally don't think I could have been any more excited as when I looked down that microscope for 4 days in a row seeing my fertilised egg change into a small embryo and then to see the larvae hatch has got to be one of the most remarkable experiences! The sperm of sea squirts is also very unusual in that its tail is over 6 times longer than the body and is a tear drop shape for the main body where the bottom of the tear is connected to the tail.

Alison Dunn was our tutor for the second day where we went down to the shore and examined multiple rockpools for the variation of wildlife with in them. Once we returned to the lab we had a mad dash of a write up to complete followed by a poster. Later on we did get to have some fun where we played a quiz and got to learn all about different shore wildlife that we had collected during the day
On the 3rd day we had Sarah Zylinski. We went to the shore again but investigated whether the size of the trapdoor is ratio to the height of the spire and if its larger when close to the tide. We must have measured at least 120 purple topshells and our hypothesis was proved false. After a report writing we all got to have a nice movie night before crashing into bed.

Our Experiment

The last two days were taken over with Group projects, ours was "What are dog whelks choice of prey?" After we had collected MANY topshells, winkles, limpets and topshells we went about placing the prey in the corners and the dog whelk in the middle and monitoring them every hour to see which the dog whelk had moved towards. Sadly we didn't get any significant results which is very frustrating after you have stayed up till 3 am monitoring the stupid things!! The report writing was the ridiculous part as we were in such a rush to get it finished that we made silly mistakes but hey ho.

TO MUCH REPORT WRITING

The last day we were there everyone had to give presentations on what they had discovered from their mini research projects. Following this everyone headed to the pub and we had a brilliant bonding night for all Zoology students, learning things that I never thought I would about my fellow course friends which is definitely not going to leave my mind any time soon.

But it was all smiles in the end 

So just as we finished the presentations with a rap, I will finish this blog post with the wonderful song that we wrote talking about our project using the Price of Bel-air and silly Dog Whelks!