So much biodiversity so little time!

Yesterday was our first day out in the Gulf of Mexico aboard the Weatherbird II, we went about 30 miles out of the bay. We went to two different stations and at each everyone performed their own little jobs to help run our operations smoothly. I learned how to use differnt methods to capture and collect many different types or organisms. I was put on neuston and bongo net duty. By the end of the night i had it down and I was covered from head to toe in plankton! Not coming back to shore till 4am was a pain but overall the trip was so much fun and it gave me a great glimpse at how diverse the Bay and Gulf are. Today we went into the laboratory classroom and sorted through shells and attempted to identify out plankton. It’s amazing how hard it can be to try and distinguish between those little guys, especially when you try and put them on a microscope to see them closer and you squish them (I did that a few times! Whoops!). My word of the day is Synodontidae, it’s a family of fish known as lizardfish. They’re a bottom-dwelling fish that live in shallow coastal waters. After the otter trawl came up on the Weatherbird II this was one of the species I was trying to identify. I was able to correctly identify 2 species but then there was another me or Dr. J was able to figure out. I thought they were pretty cool though and you can see below why they are called lizardfish!