USFSP, Day One

Week Two: Day One began today at the USF St. Petersburg campus. I'm very familiar with coastal habitats, as I have grown up minutes away from the beach my entire life. Yet, living on the east coast, I haven't really been exposed to the other side of Florida; that is, the west coast on the Gulf of Mexico. I'm a beach lifeguard back home, so I've spent hundreds of hours in the past two years walking up and down my beaches with nothing better to do than explore, observe, and note organisms on the coast. When we went to the beach in Fort De Soto today, the differences stuck out like a sore thumb. Among the biggest differences were the type of sand and the quantity and type of mollusk and bivalve shells. Its really exciting to be able to put these observations with the information we learned last week: while the east coast is subjected to higher winds and wave energy, the west coast is protected and experiences a lower wave energy. This explains why the sand is finer and perhaps why there are more shells on the coastline.

My "word of the day" is vicariance. It was on our pre-quiz today and I had no idea what it meant, so I took a wild guess and wrote something like "spacial distribution of organisms"..... which isn't that far off! Dr. Judkins defined it as geographical separation and isolation of a subpopulation, resulting over time in speciation. This definition coincides with the term "allopatric speciation" that I was introduced to in my Ecology class with Dr. Hackey.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm familiar with coastal habitats, but a large part of what Dr. Judkins lectured on today involved the open ocean habitat, so almost all of the information was new to me. My interesting fact of the day is that the open ocean is relatively efficient as compared with other ecosystems. While almost 90% of energy is lost when converting biomass from one trophic level to the next in other ecosystems, Dr. Judkins informed us that food webs in the open ocean are 50-60% efficient.

Here's a collage of some of the pictures I took today. I was in the "Scavenger Hunt" group, so we collected shells, took plant samples, and observed wildlife along the shoreline.

Top Left is a picture of myself, using a strip to determine the pH of a water sample
Top Right is a sea urchin, found by one of the other groups
Bottom Left is a picture of some of the organisms that the fishing group caught
Bottom Right is a picture of myself with a sand dollar that we collected and identified