hey gang so i wanted to share with you how field work actually works this is just my perspective
um and i think probably the perspective of a lot of my friends and colleagues as far as i can tell
so take that with a grain of salt or maybe a bunch of grains of salt
but field work is interesting because it's this uh
there's this kind of crazy catch-22 trade-off thing that happens where you you want to be very
prepared when you go to the field to execute a specific kind of plan but uh as a field biologist
and an ecologist in particular studying something as dynamic and complex as a natural ecosystem one
as diverse as a coral reef you don't want to be too ingrained i think in a plan because if you do
that you could miss opportunities to kind of go on tangents that could be incredibly fruitful and may
enhance the original idea or actually just eclipse it and just be better than the original idea
there's so much amazement that comes from observing natural ecosystems when you do it at
such an in high intensity when you're in the field constantly and you're watching nature happening
um that that little things will come a little little like patterns will pop in and you're like
wow i've never noticed that or thought about it even though you may have spent years studying this
this sick ecosystem so that's one of the trade-offs is this this whole like how much
should i just do exactly what i had originally planned versus oh i should follow my you know
interests as they kind of like manifest in the field so that's one of the one of the parts
but then the other part is there's this whole like you you really want to include a lot of of
interesting aspects to your work but you also need to replicate uh a ton so whatever you're doing you
need to do it a lot that could be experimental treatments that could be behavioral trials that's
a lot of stuff that we're doing right now you need a lot of replication to be able to
understand something clear because nature is so variable so there's this trade-off of how many
factors are you interested in in our case we're interested in um social context of fish the the
landscape context how much the the shape of the immediate reef affects fish behavior um how much
the focal species affects uh individual decisions so those are all different kinds of factors and
to really dig deeply into any of them you need a ton of replicates so what i'm getting at here is
there is this whole layers of interesting stuff to ask versus sufficient replication to actually
make some sense at the end of the day with your data so that's another trade-off uh that happens
and so you're battling with that and um what's also kind of funny is and this is something i my
students that i bring to the field complain about all the time understandably is that it becomes
it can become very repetitive um because again you're trying to get a bunch of replicates right
so you're often doing the same kinds of tasks over and over and over again so you get again
enough power to understand something but what's funny about that is as i'm describing there's some
dynamism here so you're kind of figuring things out as you're going to some degree and so you
often don't if you're anything like me you often don't lock down your methodology until you know
later than you might originally have thought you would and so then it's the situation where okay
you figured out exactly how you're going to do things and then you do them and then what seems to
often happen is you you do all these replications you do these experimental treatments these trials
you do these surveys whatever it is you're doing you do it a ton and it's new so you start out
not being good at it like everything we do in life we're not very good when we first start
but just like anything else in life as you do it a ton you get better and better and
better at it and so one of the funny like sort of catch-22s is by the time you feel like you are a
master i mean you are like awesome at the methods and you are just on top of it there's no
nothing's going to hold you back you figured out all all of the hang-ups and all the the ways
that you can work around them once that happens once you're awesome it's usually time to leave
it's usually time for the season to end so heather and i are dealing with that right now we've pretty
much locked in a method um and now we're just like all right well now that we're really good we gotta
we gotta you know make it count so anyway i hope this this helps you understand um these kinds of
vagaries about fieldwork but uh this has certainly been true in my experience and so other other
scientists out there especially early career folks i'd love to hear your thoughts on sort of if you
agree with this or if you don't but this is just kind of my take on sort of the moment-to-moment
trials and tribulations of data collection when you're at the any sort of finite field periods
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