Protect the Skidgets!

Week 13 was quite a short one. I went to my practicum on Monday and on Tuesday I played with Legos for two hours. You may be wondering, why Legos? Well, let me tell you. Professor McNeil came to class and taught us about reserve design and we used the Legos to model it. The purpose of this activity was to see whether large single reserves or separate small reserves could protect organisms better.

I partnered up with a student next to me and we were given separate small reserves to work with. We decided that our reserve would be governed by a private entity and purchased a couple of wells, along with a guard, and some bridges to connect our reserves. When it was time to breed, our skidgets reproduced faster than rabbits! As the game progressed, we were sure that our reserve design would provide us with more skidgets (organism) than we had originally started with. I kept snake-eyeing everyone’s board to compare how many skidgets were left.

The game came to end and we were asked to count the number of skidgets that we had left. We started with 8 skidgets and ended up with 13 after a long drought occurred. After everyone announced how many skidgets they were able to keep alive we found out that the single large reserves were able to protect the skidgets the best. I thought this was really interesting considering how well I thought my own skidgets were doing. One of the largest factors of skidget decline was a lack of guards to protect them from poachers.

I designed an aquatic reserve for Florida Manatees with a group and wonder how the same factors would impact aquatic organisms. It must be more difficult to predict what effect impacts will have on bodies of water because it’s difficult to see underwater. I’m sure that factors such as droughts would still have a large negative impact, but I wonder how easy it is for poachers to kill aquatic organisms. Poachers must have good eyesight because I have a difficult time seeing animals like dolphins right in front of my face.