New Bling...

I just thought I'd explain the new pictures I've posted. I was very excited when I figured out that I could display pictures, so I dug up a few.

The graph is the result of the problem I tackled from Verzani chapter 3. It is a scatterplot of the correlation between carat size and price (in Singapore dollars) of 48 diamond rings. As you would guess, the correlation is extremely high. I think it was close to 1 when I asked "R" to calculate it for me. When I get a chance, I will try and post my cool new histogram and barplots from Verzani ch 4.

The funny little kid in the hood and great big glasses is my nephew at 8 or 9 years old. He's wearing a pair of glasses I bought for him that are supposed to give you insect vision! If you haven't tried them, the lenses are made up of several prisms, so that when you put them on your view becomes hundreds of tiny pictures instead of one large frame. This is supposed to mimic the multi-faceted compound eye of some insects, such as flies. However, I've recently read that this is a misconception because the animal's brain is able to integrate the many views into one single image. I'll have to tell my nephew before he spreads false information to any more 5th graders.

The last two images relate to the data set that I am planning to use for my independent project. My data set was compiled from pitfall trap collections taken in a grassland in South-Central Texas before and after a prescribed burn. Collections were also taken at a near by control field. The pictures show the manipulated field before and after the burn event. You can see that approximately 85-90% of the living herbaceous matter has been removed by the fire or replaced with standing dead biomass. It will be interesting to see the effects this will have on the resident insect communities. In particular, I would like to focus on the dominant native and invasive ant populations in the field. Some key points are driving my curiosity here:
1) Invasive species are generally positively affected by habitat disturbance.
2) Although native and invasive ants in this field nest below ground, the invasive ants nest much deeper than the natives. Therefore, the invasive species would have an increased ability to retreat away from fatally high temperatures possibly produced by the fire.
3) One of the native ant species is strictly granivorous. The other dominant native ant species is omnivorous, while the invasive species is a highly aggressive, omnivorous scavenger. The variability in diet demands of the dominant ant species in the field make me wonder how the abrupt loss of vegetation (and supposedly a significant portion of the seed bank, according to the grassland specialists from the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center) will immediately affect these populations.