While I am working in the lab this summer, I will be spending the majority of my time digitizing the photographs of mantis shrimp appendages that my immediate supervisor, Dr. Phil Anderson, and I took during our trip to the Smithsonian last week. What I mean by digitizing is that I will go through all of the photographs and place landmarks on the mantis shrimp’s appendages. Then, after I have done this for every photo, I enter the data file into a program that will rotate and resize the pictures in order to more precisely compare the photos and the morphological differences between the various specimens. Although this task can get a bit monotonous at times, I am actually very excited because Dr. Patek bought a touchscreen tablet for me to use with my computer to help prevent myself from getting injured from the repetitive motion. The tablet is an amazing piece of technology, and I love using it on a daily basis.
Anyways, this digitizing will help our lab have a better idea of how the appendages of mantis shrimp develop. We developed multiple hypotheses of which parts of the appendage we believe will be more correlated than others, and using a Mantel test we can analyze the correlation between the different hypotheses and the data that we collected. Hopefully, one of these hypotheses will fit the data set more accurately than the others, and we can conclude that that model is a good representation of the developmental modularity of these creatures. An earlier member of the Patek lab did a similar study a few years ago, but he was studying a different type of mantis shrimp. Therefore, this project will help us get a more complete picture of what goes on during the development of these amazing creatures.
