USFSP Day One - Plankton, Diversity & Fort De Soto Park

  Today was the first day at USFSP and it went great! We began in the classroom learning about plankton, nekton, species diversity, etc., then continued the day at Fort De Soto Park. I've never taken a marine biology class, so much of this information is new to me, but I find it very interesting and I am loving the experience so far. One of the many new words for me today was Cnidaria. This is a phylum for zooplankton, and all of the organisms that are classified as Cnidaria have stinging cells; such as jelly fish and sea anemones. Another interesting thing that I learned today was that the continental shelf on the West coast of Florida goes much farther out than it does on the East coast of Florida, where I am from. This means that it takes far longer to get into deep water on the West coast; it would be great to see whales tomorrow or Thursday when we are on the Weatherbird II, but it seems unlikely since the continental shelf extends out so far. This image shows how the shelf on the east coast ends very quickly and drops off into deep ocean, but continues farther on the Gulf side.

  At Fort De Soto Park we split into groups. Our group did the "scavenger hunt", meaning that we collected various organisms, including: varying species of bivalves (the shells found in mostly halves on the beach), plants, some sand dollars, etc. This is a selection of plants that we had collected. (Note: the sea oat was picked up off of the ground).

This is Kiersten checking off some organisms we found.

We were also the group in charge of water testing. We did pH, ammonium, phosphate, nitrate and nitrite tests, and these are some pictures of the testing.

Here is a picture of me holding a sea urchin that another group had found. It was alive and the way they move is very cool!