Muddy work for researchers

AMHERST -They might be shrimp but you wouldn't want them in your cocktail.

This summer, researchers from Mount Allison University have been making trips out to the Bay of Fundy mudflats to gather mud shrimp.

Diana Hamilton is the professor leads a team of student researchers in search of the shrimp.

It's part of a project to study the eating habits of shorebirds and to find out if those habits are different between day and night.

Hamilton said the group has no idea what to expect when they look at the availability of food during the different times of day.

"Nobody's ever done it."

To collect the shrimp, student researchers take samples of mud and insert dividers between each layer to separate them.

Once the samples are back in the lab, the students put the layers into a screened pan and rinse them off until the shrimp are left behind.

The few wriggling shrimp crawl around the edge of the pan are quickly rinsed off with ethanol and funneled into a sample vial to preserve them.

But the shrimp are only part of the study that has moved on to the next phase where the researchers will film the birds at night.

To capture the birds on video, the researchers use a night vision scope about the length of an adult's forearm, attach it to a video camera and add a magnifier, all while out in the dark on the mud flats.

Hamilton said filming the birds at night allows the researchers to study their eating habits day and night.

"Do they do the same things day and night? Nobody knows."

The shorebirds normally feed by pecking their beaks into the mud in search of food, but the researchers started to see a change in their behaviour as they switched to slurping up food during the day, she said.

"The next logical step was to see what they were doing at night."

Hamilton said she is lucky because she has very good students involved with the project who work hard and are trustworthy.

"They're wonderful."

The shorebird research isn't the only project underway for Hamilton who received a Marjorie Young Bell Faculty Fellowship from the university this year.

She is using the fellowship to study the interaction of ducks with invertebrates in St. Andrews, N.B., which she said gives her a chance to go back to earlier research she did.

"It was the centre of my Ph. D. "

Hamilton said a graduate student, honours student and an assistant will help with the St. Andrews research, which can't be done in the Cumberland Basin because the ducks don't live in the mudflats found in this area.

"You have to go where the animals are."

With classes to teach during the school year and a family at home, most of the research for her projects gets done in the summer but Hamilton said it all keeps her busy.

"It's just so enjoyable."