Measuring oystercatcher predation on limpets

The Journal of Experimental Biology highlighted our paper on the interaction between limpet temperature stress and susceptibility to oystercatcher predation. The news article is available here: https://jeb.biologists.org/content/223/7/jeb224923

The paper that this work is based on is available here: https://jeb.biologists.org/content/223/7/jeb213595. This work was done in collaboration with Rachel Pound and Professor Jennifer Burnaford at CSU Fullerton as part of Rachel’s M.Sc. project. Felicia King helped with the design of the limpet force transducer that we used to estimate the force exerted by the pecking oystercatcher.

“Squeakers” the black oystercatcher interacting with our limpet force transducer. Photo: Rachel Pound.
The innards of the limpet force transducer. The right end has a 2-axis “joystick” force transducer mounted on top of a 1-axis load cell to give 3 axes of force measurement. The electronics are based on an Arduino Due 32-bit microcontroller and a custom board holding the power supply and amplifiers for the strain gages of the force transducers.