Week 4, Open Ocean week at USF St. Pete was jammed packed and went by too fast. The week started in the classroom with background/overview of plankton and basics of the open ocean ecosystem. Less than 5% has been studied, that's crazy! The real fun began on Tuesday when we took the Weatherbird II about 30 or so miles off the coast of St. Petersburg. This was serious deja vu for me, but it was amazing to be back at sea again. We used many different pieces of equipment to take samples both offshore and nearshore. I was mainly working with ID-ing any fish we brought up in the otter trawl and dredge which was so awesome. I work with sharks at UNF so collecting and measuring organisms quickly is something I'm used to, but this was hectic to say the least. Wednesday when we were back in the lab we identified plankton from the samples we took the day before. Jess and I saw many arthropod larvae and copepods, but the most fun was creating our own plankton, the Verdiscus paperclipus. He was on track to win our in class challenge, however last minute modifications brought us down! Thursday was mainly working on our projects, but we also went to the aquarium in Tampa to do ethograms on the birds and fish there. Although I ended up watching a not-so-exciting Burmese python sit there for 5 minutes. For Friday we presented our data that Jess and I compiled about (intendedly) gear selectivity for crabs. It was more of a challenge than expected given the mass amounts of data we had to work with. The peer review session was helpful though, and we got a lot of good feedback for this upcoming presentation at UWF.
Exciting last week, but pretty sad to see it ended in one more.
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