This week we were able to visit the beautiful campus of USF
St. Pete, where we were met Dr. Judkins. Unfortunately the trip on the
Weatherbird II was cancelled, but that had little effect on our awesome week in
St. Petersburg.
Most of our time was spent inside doing taxonomy work as
well as identifying and collecting plankton and talking about the major
differences between plankton and Nekton.
One of my favorite activities during this week involved conducting a ethogram , which is used to quantify an
animals behavior for a certain amount of time.
Dr. Judkins invited us to the Tampa Aquarium where we got to choose our
own unique animal to observe. Using 30 second intervals over a 15 min span, we
recorded is our animal was feeding, being social, non active or resting. After finishing
up with ethogram, we were free to look around at all the amazing animal
exhibits that the aquarium had to offer.
The day at the aquarium was one of the most memorable days I will have
of the week at USF.
Another highlight of this trip, was kayaking down the Weedon
Island where we performed various chemical test at different sites. It was
awesome to kayak down a mangrove tunnel/creek , where the only challenge was
making sure your paddle didn’t get stuck in the mangrove roots. After our hours
of kayaking we checked the biodiversity of oyster reefs using a hammer to break
about oysters and record any moving objects we observed.
The last and final day at USF St. Pete, we organized a
presentation over data collected from 2013 to 2016 from the weatherbird II.
This presentation allowed us to figure out what skills we needed to improve on
for future presentations as well as find trends within data collections over
time or onshore Vs offshore locations.
I really enjoyed the personality of Dr. Judkins and all the
University of South Florida St. Pete had to offer. Hopefully one we will be
able to travel back to St. Pete to collect samples on the wetherbird II and
have another enjoyable opportunity with Dr. Judkins.
No comments:
Post a Comment