Week 4: Please Stop Putting Me On Boats

Open Oceans

Me before death on board

The Weatherbird

This week we were at USFSP working with open ocean ecosystems. And what I have learned for the second time in this course is that I get sea sick. Would you look at that, the marine biologist who can't get on a boat. Even though I was sitting and staring at the horizon for most of the cruise on the R/V Weatherbird II, it was still a pretty awesome experience. Seeing sampling done hands on is something totally new for me and we pulled up quite a few interesting species (even if we had to deploy the otter trawl about 4 times due to too small doors, not our fault by the way).

This cushion star was probably
 bigger than my head

The rest of the week after that was based around analysis and presentation of data. We identified plankton species from samples and found some rad fish larvae with still beating hearts, which was pretty darn fascinating even if staring into a microscope gives me a headache. My body seems to hate biology but it's fine. We also made plankton in attempts to get them to a neutral buoyancy and ours kinda was as long as Chris spiked it into the bucket first.

Our child Plankteous mcplanktei

On Thursday we went to the aquarium, the place I truly feel at home; outreach to the public and no boats, what a dream. We conducted ethograms on a few species while there then got to wander about. I did my observations on a very angry french angelfish.

But Friday was my proudest moment because I have never been so attached to graphs before. These graphs are my pride and joy, bask in their professionalism (minus them being too small of font, I'll work on that). But in seriousness Lisa and I analyzed pH change at our locations over the past 4 years and there's been some serious decline which is honestly frightening.

Look at that hand angle, that's someone who knows what their talking about.

In conclusion R.I.P. my stomach, but I had fun.
-Shannon Brauer