Today was our first classroom day here at my home campus USFSP. We began in lecture on open ocean and learned lots of interesting facts in the big four areas of oceanography; biology, geology, chemistry, and physical. My word of the day is nekton which is basically any motile marine animal. After our lecture we headed out to Ft. Desoto for some field work! It was threatening rain but held out for us and even for my additional four hours of research work! Overall a great day in the field! We did some fishing with sane net and sieved sediments to attain a wide array of taxa to practice identifying. Below are some of our most interesting finds!
Our olive snail snacking on a juvenile file fish.
Baby puffer fish.
Dr. Judkins helping us identify the shell species.
After our lovely time sifting through sediments and capturing many species I have never seen before; I decided to try again on my research this time with much more success! I found the seagrass beds with ease this time but making a perimeter was the challenging part to due patchiness of the beds. After coming up with a solution to this problem I pressed forward and finally began my quadrat work! I randomly placed my quadrat in three areas within the perimeter of each of the two beds I surveyed,
began a species composition list, and took the abiotic factors in each quadrat. It was quite a task and luckily I have gained some volunteers for next time! Who doesn't love snorkeling in less than knee deep water for four hours?! :)
Seagrass bed 1 and quadrat. As you can see the waters were quite turbid today.
We think its a hydra? Veryyyy abundant, they wrap around the
blades of grass and appear to filter feed.
Like I said... very abundant. Came out covered on multiple occasions.
The primary equipment used.
Here is a link with basic info on seagrasses of Fl for those interested: http://www.dep.state.fl.us/coastal/habitats/seagrass/
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