Today I got to meet Dr. Judkins the lead instructor here at USFSP and I am delighted to be able to spend a week with her soaking up all the knowledge that I can. A new word that I learned today in our lecture was vicariance which is defined as geographical separation and isolation of subpopulation, resulting over time in speciation. This afternoon I was able to experience my first day out in the field collecting data and gathering a general idea of what species are found here. In the third picture down we were sifting sand for various shells and invertebrates. In the first picture me and Jesse are sorting through the many fish we collected with the seine net trying find as many different species as we could see. The second picture is a bone fish still in its larval stage of life and then the last picture is a juvenile scrawled file fish (Aluterus scriptus). Overall today was an amazing learning experience as to how great the biodiversity is on our coastlines here in Florida.