May 24, 2004
"Data Analysis"
by Haley Houghton

I came to Madagascar to get my hands dirty with some field work. I planned on being in Tana for only a few days before hopefully getting out into the field. Something I've learned in my short time on the island is that things rarely go as planned. The morning after my arrival Luke sat down across from me in his house in Tana and asked whether I had taken Statistics and whether I could use Excel. Upon responding that I did and I could, he plopped Jenny and me down for three days in front of the computer with previous years fossa data. So much for the field. We compared prey items found in fossa scat during the wet season and the dry season in different regions and then compared the results to a survey of prey abundance. In this way, we could determine whether a prey item was more or less likely to be eaten by a fossa compared to its availability. Although I was anxious to get into the field, it was interesting to get a glimpse at previous years' data before I began to collect it myself. It put into perspective the fieldwork that I am now doing at Ankarafantsika. When I happened upon a pile of feathers from a devoured Coua, I knew that the Coua had the odds stacked against it in the first place. Fossa prey on Couas more than their relative abundance would predict.