Preliminary results, jelly beans, and a new collaboration

Hello all! Here's a quick update on where the project is so far. After 2 months of data collection (July-August 2015), I found that there was no effect of my traffic noise treatments on frog abundance. However, there was a strong effect of date, which probably correlates with weather (which makes sense, because frogs are generally more active on wet, warm days). At this point, I could say that my work is done; traffic noise doesn't affect frogs; yay for conservation! Unfortunately (or fortunately), science doesn't quite work that way, because scientists are trained to look carefully and critically at their data. And after doing so, there is only one conclusion that I can come to: I don't have enough data yet to make any meaningful conclusions.

The problem is that my sample sizes (number of frogs encountered) have been very small. Because of this, it's hard to make a valid conclusion about what's really going on. Think of it this way: I have 3 bags of jelly beans. They all contain red, blue, and green beans, but one bag is 70% red, the second bag is 70% blue, and the third bag is 70% green. Now, if I drew a jelly bean out of each bag 10 times, it would quickly become clear that the different bags have different dominant colors. But, if I only drew twice, it would be very difficult to tell which bag is which because I have a decent chance of getting 2 different colors of beans. That is the issue with my study: If I only see a few frogs at each site, it's hard to see what the overall pattern is.

 

So why have I been seeing so few frogs? I think the issue is that I don't have enough manpower. I'm only one person, and even with the help of my faithful undergrads, it's impossible to go out every night to look for frogs and stay out all night. However, even though we can't do that, there are machines that can. And with that, I am happy to announce my collaboration with Dr. Anna Savage at UCF! She has been working to develop recording devices that biologists can use to inexpensively and intensively monitor their field sites, and she has donated 4 of them to my project. This will allow me to monitor my field sites for frog calls at all hours of the night and day, which will greatly increase my sample size and allow me to make statistically sound conclusions about whether frogs avoid traffic noise. Thanks, Anna!