USFSP, Day 4

My favorite part of today was when we organized the results of the sampling that was done on tuesday's cruise. We organized all of the organisms into categories based on the methods that we used to obtain them. We had a table for the otter trawl and a table for the capetown dredge. The otter trawl samples organisms that are in the middle of the water column while the dredge captures organism from the benthic region, or bottom sediment of the habitat. These two tables showed the differences in the species densities and diversity within the offshore day station and the onshore night station. I thought these were really interesting because there are so many questions and experiment that could be generated simply from these simple charts. For example we could study whether there were more fish active during the day or night and which species of fish. This gave me a taste of the results from real field research and I really enjoyed it. One of the interesting things we talked about with the charts was the biodiversity of these two habitats. biodiversity is the degree of variation of life forms within a given species, ecosystem, biome or planet. I thoroughly enjoyed this week and all of the materials that we went through. Getting real practice research on a sea voyaging vessel was a very unique and fascinating experience. This week has opened up my eyes to the diversity and uniqueness of all of the organisms in our world and I cant wait to learn more about these amazing creatures.