I got to go to a real controlled burn yesterday with my Ecosystems of Florida class and did my little fire ecology experiment. I was looking at how much trees (slash pines, Pinus eliottii) were utilized as fire escape routes for bugs and other small animals as a function of saw palmetto (Serenoa repens) cover. Basically saw palmetto, besides being not fun to hold by the stalks and providing some awful tasting emergency food, makes for great fires and might be an un-incentive for little critters to go underground, but at the same time, maybe can also make going up trees a lot more dangerous and actually encourage more critters to go underground. So my way of testing this was wrapping the tree's cicrumference about 3 meter above the ground (as high as I can safely reach with the ladder) and manipulating palmetto cover by hacking it up and dumping the hacked up bits elsewhere so I'd have full cover, half cover, and no cover within a 1 meter radius. I had 6 replicates of 3 treatments and my gut-instinct conclusion is: put the duct tape much higher up the tree, although I did catch a few bugs, but the real prize was a little common anole. Most of my tapes were either severely melted, or in two of my replicates, completely burned away. I might post my results after doing a real analysis :)
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