This week here at USFSP has been absolutely amazing! We've had amazing opportunities to learn and gain the invaluable field experience. Although our time on the Weatherbird II was abbreviated due to tropical storm Andrea, we still were able to collect and analyze some data just not as much as we would have liked. On Thursday we spent the morning on the ship cleaning up and packing our equipment. We had two more of Thomas's amazing meals on board and headed over to STG to wash all the equipment.
Gloves: cleaned
After everything was all spic and span we broke and met back up at the Florida Aquarium where we observed many marine species in their common ecosystems. We were given a small assignment; to create an ethogram, which is a list of observations of behaviors of a species. I chose to do mine on the rosette spoonbill. I enjoy gaining the experience that field scientists utilize during their projects. Many students our age never get this opportunity until graduate school, I am very thankful to be apart of this adventure as it is giving me ideas for career track opportunities.
My word of the day is species richness, which is actually what my research is on. In the beginning I misunderstood the term and thought I was studying the biodiversity of seagrass beds, which takes into account abundance and number of different species present, whereas species richness(what I am studying) is the number of different species present in a given area. On friday we did a brief review of things we learned during open ocean week. We also organized our data we collected during the cruise, it was very interesting to see the differences between the two stations and hypothesize possible explanations for these differences.
Part of our data and slide show on diversity.
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