Day 9: Shame on You, Acorns!

This morning was a good day for sleeping in, as classes were cancelled at NCSU until 11:00 because of the freezing rain last night. I didn't mind the extra sleep at all!

This morning I experimented a little more with the fecal samples to see if I could draw any more conclusions, and I found something very interesting! I examined each of the samples from the wild ponies to look at the acorn content and relate it to the data I already had to see if I could make any comparisons. I created a ten-point scale for the acorn content--ten is high, and one is low. I picked through the samples and gave each of them a number on the scale and then looked to see if there were any trends regarding amount of acorns and the EPG. It turns out, that (for the large majority) the higher amount of acorns in the feces, the higher the EPG was, and the smaller amount of acorns, the lower the EPG was! I made some graphs to represent my data:

I think that a major reason for this is that in order to eat the acorns, the ponies have to eat very close to the ground (which is why they had a lot of sand in their feces, too), but the ponies that consume other things as their main diet, such as grass, do not have to eat right off of the ground. For example, a lot of the grass in the outer banks right now is very long, so the ponies can clip off the top couple inches of it without ever getting anywhere close to the ground, which would then lower their risk for getting parasites. It would be interesting to see if this would change in the summer months when most of the ponies eat well-maintained, short grass in people's lawns. Who knows!

Yesterday I was saying that I was able to look at some hatched Small Strongyle larvae, and here it is! The small and large are identified by how long the tail is.

My mom made it to NCSU in the afternoon, so I finished my time there by showing her where I've been working. Tomorrow will be for research, then we're going to head home on Friday.