I Am the Captain Now
Week 4 of this course was the most densely packed section of the course so far which had positives and negatives. The positives were that I learned so much about using data collecting gear in the field, how to analyze data in short periods of time, how to create professional scientific research presentations, and a lot of how much effort it takes to conduct research out at sea. The negatives were mainly just the short amount of time we had to complete so many tasks and how tired we all were by the end of the week. The first day we mainly covered introductory material for the cruise in the lectures which was the easiest day, but then Tuesday was when things started picking up.
We boarded the Weatherbird II at 10 a.m and didn't come back to the docks until 12:30 at night, which didn't help the fact that we had class early the next morning. The cruise was a really fun, albeit draining, experience. We collected water quality and plankton samples, my personal favorites, along with using a dredge and ottertrawl to capture benthic and some pelagic organisms. Those organisms captured were put into buckets and sorted accordingly by species and were all eventually logged in our data sets. Unfortunately, most people were stung severely by hydrozoans when hangling the caught species, most likely due to the hydrozoans releasing some nemotocysts when they felt threatened which injected into people's skin. I was lucky enough to have voluntered to record data so my hands didn't get stung badly as the other students, but they described to me the type of pain they were in which lasted days after the cruise.
The next day we viewed the plankton samples under microscopes which was an awesome experience for me and I was able to see so many zooplankton like copepods and barnacle larvae. We were all extremely tired this day, but it was probably my favorite since I love working with microscopes and I could potentially end up studying plankton one day depending on what graduate program I decide to go with. We also created model phytoplakton and had a competition on which group could make their model neutrally buoyant (or just sink very slowly). Our plankton, which I am naming Planky, was able to sink at the slowest rate and won us the glorious prize of a pat on the back (all worth it in a long days work).
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| Planky's first victory (many more to come in its life) |
The fourth day involved rushing to analyze data and create a presentation out of it within 5.5 hours which was very intense and definitely left me with a headache afterwards. This was probably my least favorite day of the week, even though I learned a lot about scientific presentations and how to present information. I was just so stressed trying to get everything done that it wasn't a very enjoyable experience, coupled with the fact I was already exhausted at that point in the week. The final day involved us taking some water samples for our final group project and discussing what questions we will try to answer with the data we collected. After that we got to go have some fun at the Florida Aquarium and we monitored animal behavior which was super cool, along with all of the birds they had walking around in the wetland exhibit. Overall a challenging but rewarding week!
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