I had a great week at USFSP. Thursday which was supposed to be spent on the Weatherbird II for a second day, ended up turning into cleaning of the supplies, dodging Tropical Storm Andrea (we still got soaked), and heading to the Florida Aquarium, where we did an ethogram (behavioral observation of an animal - I studied the Otters), and a scavenger hunt to find out various things about different marine species in the aquarium.
I really enjoyed doing the ethogram. At first it was hard to tell the three Otters apart, so I recorded notes on all of their behaviors, but after a few minutes I could tell them apart from their personalities that were starting to show. One was very energetic and did continuous flips off the glass wall. I had seen this same Otter at their lunch time, doing the same thing and jumping up and down for fish, his name was Branden, and I think he was very young. There was also a lazy one that kept laying his or her head on the rocks to rest and staring at me as if studying my behavior. The third was between the other two in energy levels and mostly swam side to side and rolling over. It was cool to think that after only 10 minutes I could tell them apart pretty easily. I think I would really enjoy being an animal behaviorist. This is one of the Otters I studied.
On Friday, in addition to wrapping up the week, we watched Blue Planet. It was a very interesting video. Besides penguins and enhingas, I had no idea that birds that look like sea gulls can dive down 15 meters!
Overall I really enjoyed this week. We studied plankton (who knew there were so many types, and so many species of each?! Copepods alone have over 12,000 species!). We also got to spend some quality time on the Weatherbird II research vessel, and do research with five pieces of equipment. Then we analyzed our data and took a trip to the Florida Aquarium. It is cool how many activities we were able to fit into one week and I can't imagine if every teacher had to repeat their week 5 times in a row - that would be so exhausting! Each day it gets steadily harder to wake up early, the tiredness just keeps adding up! A challenge for me this week, that I didn't really see coming, was actually with the Otter Trawl on the Weatherbird II. I'm vegetarian, for health reasons but more so for the animals, so watching all of the fish come up in the trawl, and watching them flop around for breath and not being able to do anything was hard for me. I tried to ignore it, and by the second Otter Trawl we had buckets ready and were able to save a lot of fishes' lives. Another challenge also pertaining to the fish was actually just picking them up. I don't fish and I can't remember the last time I held a fish, so picking them up with thick gloves on, and trying to be gentle was hard! They are really slippery, and thin, and they flop around a lot. I hadn't expected that they would be difficult to get a handle on, and after a while it wasn't, but it took getting used to.
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