How to handle zeroes in ecological data

The analysis of ecological data can be a difficult endeavor. Ecological data are noisy: some days are windy, some days are hotter than usual, sometimes ants chew through your carefully placed flagging tape, and sometimes your entire experiment disappears overnight. It's an experimental crime scene. We usually deal with these myriad problems with a variety of fancy statistics and massive sample sizes. But even before the monkey sh*t hits the fan, there is an incredibly common data-related questio