Hi all! I’m Nicole, a rising Pomona fourth year, and this summer I’m working with data on the diving patterns of Cassin’s auklets in the family Alcidae. These sea faring birds budget their energy and time depending on prey availability, and the feeding needs of themselves and their chicks. Auklets also demonstrate different types of dives: more ‘V’ shaped dives tend to be for finding pockets of prey underwater, while more ‘U’ shaped dives are more for actual feeding. These data were taken by gluing small Time-Depth Recorders (TDR’s) on the body feathers of individual auklets and recording temperature and pressure on preset intervals as the birds go about their daily routines.
Here’s me in the lab!
Other projects have looked at different aspects of these data and my job is to process the most recent years. Three weeks into my ten week project, I’ve so far been writing python programs that will take a file of data from an individual bird and separate the data points into dive bouts made up of dives as well as calculating different attributes. One of these attributes is how U-shaped a dive is, which I calculated by determining what percentage of the data points are in the lowest 25% of the dive depth. Over the next few weeks I’ll be developing an interface for these programs and can then decide what aspect of these birds’ behavior I’m most interested in analyzing for my thesis!
My fellow students keep me company while we code for different projects.