I Think My Head Might Explode

Since I have my river crab specimens now, this past week I've been working on them in the lab. 

First I am required to take pictures of them. The picture taking process needs to be standardized and so I use a stand and the same back drop for all of the specimen. It looks like a small scale photo shoot.... which is kind of what it is, just for crabs.

After I have taken all the photos, I put the pictures on the computer and get to start the analysis part. I use a program called TPS that you can just down load from the internet. The first step is to put "landmarks" on the crabs. The landmarks help me look at the shape of the crabs individually and put the shape in mathematical terms. That's what I've been doing for the last 2 days... land-marking 104 crabs with 33 landmarks each.

Today I finished land-marking and was ready to use another part of the TPS for my research! Dr. Jara's Ph D student, that is helping me, started explaining what all the graphs produced from my land-marking mean. And I thought my head would explode. I mean I have taken Statistics in high school and Genetics which is also like statistics, but this was over my head. He started off talking about "principal component analysis"- yeah, I have no idea what that is. Then he continued and started explaining partial warps and relative warps. Every once and a while I would understand principles like "least square regression line" and I would think okay I know what that is but I have no idea how I'm getting that from my data or how it even helps me come up with a conclusion! He could tell I wasn't get it so he gave me 3 manuals, 1 text book and 3 research articles to read so I can understand. Basically I have to self teach myself multivariate analyses. 

Great.