This week was our last week of the FIO Marine Field Studies
course. It was so hard to say goodbye to everyone, and it was sort of bitter
sweet that the last week was back home for me at UWF. For the UWF week, we
focused mostly on water quality in the Pensacola water shed. We looked at
Indian Bayou, Carpenter Creek, and Bayou Texar, taking water samples from each
to look at back in the lab and making note of any vegetation and wildlife in
the areas.
Monday, we started by observing the headwaters that led into
Indian Bayou toward the Milton area and worked our way south to Pensacola Beach
in order to get an idea of how water travels from inland areas toward the Gulf
of Mexico in our area. Everyone got a chance to take water quality samples and
record data along the way, which was good practice for all of us before the
course ended. We observed many factors that changed throughout the system as we
traveled south, from vegetation to sediment composition.
Pitcher plants we observed on Monday toward the headwaters that lead into the Pensacola watershed
Tuesday, we monitored seagrass beds in the Santa Rosa Sound
and learned how ground water discharge affects seawater. It was really fun
looking at transects of seagrass in the area and learning how to take pore
water samples. We also learned a little bit about the geology involved in tracking
pore water through certain chemicals that are found in it, which was super
interesting.
Wednesday, we stopped at Pensacola beach to learn about some
of the methods of tracking shorebird nesting and visited the Pensacola EPA lab to
learn about their research taking place currently. I haven’t been very good
with spotting or IDing birds in the past, so this was actually a pretty interesting
day for me because it was out of my comfort zone. I enjoyed learning the basics
of how to track a bird using a tracking tag and how difficult it is to spot
eggs on the beach or bands on the leg of a little shorebird. The EPA lab was
also a blast – we learned about so many projects, from effects of excess
chemicals in the water on amphibians to effects of coral eating microplastics.
Left: Looking for fake shorebird eggs in the sand dunes
Center: Juvenile amphibian used in studies at the EPA lab
Right: Coral being used in studies at the EPA lab
Thursday was mostly lab work, and since we were the
turbidity group, we filtered all of our samples for analysis. Once the samples
were filtered, we dried them and weighed them to compare the turbidity of the
water at various locations across the Pensacola watershed. We spent the rest of
the day putting together a presentation for Friday.
Friday, we took our skills test and wrapped up the course
with our water quality symposium. My group was composed of myself, Daniel,
Micaiala, and Jessica, and we looked at turbidity of water samples taken from
various sites around Florida. We found that the most turbid water was located
in Jacksonville and the least turbid water was found in the Florida Keys from
our samples.
It was rough having to say goodbye to so many amazing
friends at once, but hopefully we’ll cross paths in the future. This course has
opened up so many opportunities for me, and I couldn’t be more grateful for
every single experience that I’ve gained from this experience. To those of you
who help put this course together, I cannot thank you enough for everything I’ve
experienced in the past five weeks.
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