50 Meter Survey

Monday’s are 50 Meter Survey day. We do them every other Monday.  We wake up bright and early and get our SPAM puree in squeeze bottles from Katrina and head to our individual areas on the island.  The whole island is marked with flags every 50 meters.  It is like a grid.  At each flag there is a plastic card on the ground.  What we do is to walk our grid and squirt some SPAM on each card.  We record what flag we are at and what time we laid the SPAM down.  Then we move to the next 50 meter flag and repeat the process until we have finished SPAMing our grids. 

 

Then we wait.  We wait two hours from when we laid the SPAM on the card and when we walk by to read the results.  So I put the goo down at 6:15am and I read it at 8:15.  I walk my grid again looking at the cards and see what kinds of ants are eating the SPAM.  Again we mark this in our notebooks, the time we are reading the card and who are on the card.  It could be Yellow Crazy Ants or “other ants species (OAS).”  If we see YCA, we are to count them and indicate how many we see, up to forty.  After forty, it is just considered a lot so we say greater than forty.  For OAS, we simply say “yes” or “no.” 

The whole point of the survey is to keep tabs of where the YCA are.  There is an infestation area and we do not want them to expand on their boundary.  After we finish reading all of our points, we go back to camp and enter our data into the computer.  Katrina then uses GIS to display the data.  It is a map of the island that shows a dot every 50 meters.  The dot changes color based on whether we saw ants at the point and how many.  It makes the data more manageable for understanding where the ants are.  It’s pretty cool and I feel great to be part of the work.