I’m trying something a bit different this year: I bought a special cord that lets me enter a measurement directly from my calipers into my data spreadsheet. I’m hoping it’s going to save time ultimately (though I’m still recording everything on paper for backup). Because of the way the input is set up, it’s easier to make each column correspond to an individual lizard and each row a trait. Usually I work the other way around. So that means, instead of 500 rows for 500 lizards, this time I’m heading way far right in the spreadsheet… farther than I’ve ever gone before.
Yes, that means we cruised past AA, AB, and AC; kept going through LL, LM, LN, LO, and LP and got all the way here to QA, QB, QC. I was hoping to get to AAA, AAB, AAC (out around column 700) but alas, we didn’t have *that many* lizards this year. Here’s hoping for 2019 though. For the mathematically astute you’ll no doubt catch that column QC is only lizard 445 but my previous post claimed we caught 531 this season (that’d be column TK). The answer to the discrepancy is that some of the lizards had to be measured on the island the old fashioned way and so didn’t get the direct input into Excel… I’m heading to a café now to start typing them in.
Experiencing column QC made me think of this scene from the Fellowship of the Ring:
Colin Donihue 
Interesting – what’s the name of the cord?