Designing Successful Field Studies.

G& E begin this chapter by stating that many studies are initiated without a clear answer to the question of what the actual point of the study is. I know this from my own experience, where I have gone out in the field to collect data without having clearly thought of a specific hypothesis, only that I wanted to find out parasitism levels of a particular caterpillar on two plants just out of curiosity. This can be problematic in the sense that when it comes to down to carrying out analyses or even writing a paper on your results it can be difficult to figure out actually what your main thesis or argument is and highlights the importance of always having a focused question. I guess it always seems to come down to having some kind of argument and being able to defend it with the appropriate theory. When I sat down to write my paper I really struggled with the introduction because I couldn't figure out what it was that I actually arguing about. Sometimes, though just going out and observing what's going on can lead you to formulate a hypothesis so you can eventually conduct experimental tests. For example, trying to find out whether there are any spatial or temporal differences in the variable of interest. For me, my question was simply does parasitism vary between two plant species and over the season? But as G&E mention it is difficult to discuss specific mechanisms without some sense of the spatial or temporal pattern in your data. Seems to me that it is difficult to discuss mechanisms period without conducting any kind of manipulative experiment.

It was interesting reading about snapshot experiments, I get the feeling that scientists particularly some ecologists can have a negative view of experiments conducting over a short term, but I guess it depends on what you are measuring. Surely if you are measuring short term responses, you would only need short term experiments. For example, I am really interested in induced responses in plants following attack by herbivores. My advisor has criticized many experiments conducted in this area as being quickly put together, and seems to place no value on them because they were conducted in a short amount of time and that the same authors keep churning out papers because of the short term nature of their study system. But I wonder what is wrong with this if the response you are measuring is a rapid-induced response!! Surely you wouldn’t need to spend 10 years of gathering field data trying to establish this as long as you have enough replicates.