Under the Surface at Pensacola Beach
August 26th, 2010Rob Diaz de Villegas WFSU-TV
Last month, I ventured just outside the Forgotten Coast to Pensacola Beach. I was serving as videographer for Matt Roush and FSU Headlines. The piece was on research by Marcus Huettel and Joel Kostka on some important little critters (we love important little critters), really little ones. The sand was a gleaming white, reflecting the sun onto me and burning my feet. Parents and children swam in the water while a row of bulldozers sat idle with bored cleanup workers resting in the shade of their machines’ canopies. At a glance, it didn’t look like the beach had recently been covered in a mat of crude oil.
Drs. Huettel and Kostka took a little more than a glance, though. They and their graduate students dug two trenches in the sand, one on each side of a tent set up by a family right next to the designated research area. I wondered if those vacationers looked into those trenches and saw what we saw, what you’ll see in the video above. It looked like a Viennetta ice cream cake- clean white vanilla with little streaks of chocolate. At least the oil was a little deeper than where a sandcastle moat would be dug.
The little critters being studied eat oil; microbes who may provide us with a safe alternative to products like Corexit. Corexit disperses oil, spreading it thin enough to be considered safe, with a low enough parts-per-million in the water. Corexit itself is a solution of mysterious composition (one disclosed ingredient is petroleum distillate) which is potentially toxic. It’s difficult to tell, as few people know what is in it. Of course, all of those microbes are part of an ecosystem, and their feeding on this abundant food source and thriving and multiplying may have consequences as well. Intuitively, the solution nature has honed over millions of years should work more effectively and with less harm to the Gulf than one that seems like it was designed to quickly disperse oil and get it out of our sight. We’ll see what the research finds.
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Tags: bacteria, coastal ecology, deepwater horizon oil spill, Florida State University, FSU Coastal and Marine Lab, marine biology, microbes, Pensacola BeachPosted in At the Beach | No Comments »
Two Poems
August 25th, 2010
Here are two more poems by Dawn Evans Radford. In her first post, she depicted the day of an oysterman. Here we have a limerick about the oysters themselves, and a more serious piece on our relationship with our natural surroundings.
Dawn Evans Radford
Limerick
Down in the bay lived a plump little oyster
whose hormone changes eventually forced her
to fly into a tizzy.
Cried she, I get dizzy
trying to decide if I’m a girl or a boyster.
Book of the Minor Prophet
And the gods said, “Let there be light
and beaches washed in ocean salt;
and let the pristine Earth bring forth rain
forests, red clover, Georgia peaches, and
collard greens.
Let us make the sperm whale, passenger
pigeon, buffalo, and butterflies.
And let there be Man to stroll the beaches,
watch over the creatures, to sleep in clover,
eat plump peaches, and keep us company.”
Then Man saw all was good; and he said,
“Let there be fun for all and profit for me.
Now let me make benzene, Red #2, Strontium
90, cups of chemicals running over.
And let me live by megabucks, pave the
wetlands, and dump my sewage in the waters.”
Then the rivers and the sky turned gray.
The butterflies and clover lay down to die.
And the good in the Earth,
and beauty of the sea
were no more.
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Tags: forgotten coast, gulf of mexico, marine ecology, nature, oyster, poetryPosted in In the Arts | 1 Comment »
Rain Delay
August 19th, 2010
Dr. Randall Hughes FSU Coastal & Marine Lab
Emily Field vacuums bugs
After a summer of relatively problem-free field work, it appears that our luck has run out. Our plan for this week’s post was to discuss our research on seagrass and algal epiphyte interactions, but multiple attempts to get seagrass footage have been delayed due to thunderstorms or otherwise less than ideal conditions. That post will have to wait for later, and now seems an opportune time to discuss the myriad ways that the best laid research plans can go awry.
Science, and field research in particular, takes a lot of planning. We try to minimize potential problems by making detailed protocols and supply lists, and by bringing back-up equipment in the field in case something breaks. However, invariably, things can still go wrong, for a number of reasons:
1. You forget (or lose) something. This is perhaps one of the more frustrating ways that research can be hamstrung, because it is so avoidable. Most research sites require some sort of travel to access, so you can’t just run back to the lab to grab whatever item you forgot. One memorable example was a trip to St. Joe Bay last summer to find sites and select research plots. Everything we needed to do that day was largely contingent on having our GPS unit handy, but of course it was back at the lab (a half hour kayak and hour drive away). It is now one of the items (including a first aid kit, water-proof paper, cable ties, and lots of pencils) that we do not leave the lab without!
2. You break something. Though also frustrating, this problem is often inevitable when using equipment around salt water over extended periods of time. Salt is the enemy to all things electronic, of course, but also to much of our field gear that has some small, critical piece made of metal. We buy corrosion-resistant materials when possible, bring back-up supplies, rinse gear with freshwater after every use, and keep a lot of WD-40 on hand in the lab. Currently, our biggest fear in the field is that the bug vacuum will break, because it is too bulky to have a back-up on hand, and it is very sensitive to salt water. Thank goodness we have great maintenance staff at the lab to help us fix it when it does break!
3. Weather. Afternoon thunderstorms are simply a fact of life when conducting research in Florida in the summer. Last summer I spent lots of time calling family, friends, and marine lab staff – anyone I thought may be sitting near a phone and a computer – to find out what was coming our way on the radar. This summer I splurged (with personal funds) and bought an iPhone so that I can check it myself! We also try to start working as early in the day as possible, though the tide (and sleepy students) don’t always cooperate with that plan.
4. Non-demonic intrusion. This term is among my favorites, coined by an ecologist to describe un-planned, chance events that influence the results of an experiment. Included in this category are things like hurricanes, oil spills, and pest outbreaks. If the chance event affects all experimental plots equally, then there is not really a problem, unless it destroys the experiment altogether. Of greater concern is when some chance occurrence influences only a portion of an experiment, causing those plots to differ in an unplanned manner from the other experimental plots. There are ways to design experiments to minimize the potential impacts of non-demonic intrusion: for instance, different experimental treatments are mixed together (“interspersed” in science-speak) so that you don’t have all of one treatment on one side of the experiment and all of another treatment on another side. In addition, it is important to include multiple plots of the same treatment (“replication”), so that in case one or a few plots are lost or damaged, there are others that remain.
Non-demonic intrusion is generally viewed as a bad thing, but some of my more interesting scientific findings have resulted from un-planned events that have influenced my experiments. The best example of this is without a doubt an experiment that I conducted as a graduate student in a seagrass bed in northern California. I designed the experiment to see if plots with one or a few seagrass genotypes differed from plots with many seagrass genotypes. Despite measuring lots of responses (seagrass density and biomass, fish and invertebrate abundance, epiphytic algal biomass, sediment nutrient concentrations), I didn’t find any significant differences in the first 6 months of the experiment. Then, migratory brandt geese arrived that winter in Bodega Bay (ironically, both the site of my experiment and the location where Alfred Hitchcock filmed The Birds):
-and, to my surprise, they grazed very heavily on the seagrass in my plots. Although I was despondent after discovering that my previously lush seagrass plots looked like someone had run over them with a lawn mower:
I counted the number of shoots in each plot and dutifully entered and analyzed the data on my computer. Lo and behold, I found my first significant effect of seagrass genotypic diversity – more diverse plots had more shoots following grazing by geese! This unexpected event resulted in my first publication, and thus began a series of field and laboratory experiments further investigating the ecological effects of seagrass genetic diversity.
But that’s a story for another day!
Randall’s research is funded by the National Science Foundation.
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Tags: coastal ecology, Florida State University, forgotten coast, FSU Coastal and Marine Lab, gulf of mexico, marine biology, marine ecology, National Science Foundation, NSF, weatherPosted in In the Grass | No Comments »
Operation Noah’s Ark
August 16th, 2010
Rob Diaz de Villegas WFSU-TV
The video above is from our dimensions program. It dovetails nicely with what we care about on this site, which is the ecology of Florida’s Forgotten Coast, in this case salt marshes. The idea is that, when looking to minimize potential oil damage to our coast, you start with its smallest building blocks. Operation Noah’s Ark, based out of the Gulf Specimen Marine Lab in Panacea, is collecting a lot of little critters that live in places like salt marshes. The fiddler crab helps maintain the marsh with its burrows, which bring oxygen to cordgrass roots. In that grass, juvenile mullet find shelter, as do blue crabs and juvenile pinfish. The Kemps-Ridley Sea Turtle eats those blue crabs, and those pinfish will mature and swim out into the gulf to be eaten by gag grouper. You can see how one species becoming compromised can have a cascading effect throughout the Gulf.
The interconnectedness of the coastal food-web underscores that we need to look at oil effects in the long term. One population of fish may be healthy today, but if its prey is unhealthy and dies off then it too may die off. This is a tricky thing to get people to think about. Within the last couple of weeks, the Deepwater Horizon seep was capped, and the government declared that most of the oil has been broken up. It feels good to think about this crisis ending, and life on the Gulf returning to some kind of normality. I’m not saying it won’t. But there is still a lot of oil in the Gulf, and dispersant, and damage isn’t always quick to present itself. Riki Ott, a marine biologist who experienced the Exxon Valdez spill, points out that while the worst of the spill was deemed to be over two years later, the ecosystem crashed another two years after that when the Salmon in Prince William Sound died off. And that of course had dire economic consequences.
In light of recent optimism, this kind of thinking isn’t always popular. And these kinds of things are unpredictable. It could be that the long term effects are minimal. But considering what is at stake, it pays to be vigilant.
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Tags: blue crab, coastal ecology, cordgrass, deepwater horizon oil spill, fiddler crab, gulf of mexico, marine biology, marine ecology, nature, salt marsh, science, smooth cordgrass, spartina alternifloraPosted in In the Grass | No Comments »
Oysterman
August 12th, 2010
In Yesterday’s post, Tanya Rogers wrote about an old-timer oysterman in Jacksonville whose local knowledge aided David Kimbro and his team in locating reefs to study. In today’s post, we take a poetic look at the life of an oysterman.
This is the first post by Dawn Evans Radford, a resident of Franklin County with deep roots in the area. She is a published writer of poetry, literary research, and fiction; her novel Oyster Flats won the 1993 Sherwood Anderson Award. Most recently she contributed to Unspoiled, a compilation in which Florida writers speak for the preservation of Florida’s wild coast and against offshore drilling. She is currently writing a second novel and, happily, contributing posts to this site.
Dawn Evans Radford
Oysterman
The oysterman groans and rolls over into the four o’clock
cold to pull on rubber boots and layers of shirts.
By bald-faced bulb light he gulps fatback, grits and biscuits,
coffee sweetened to a syrup,
then gives his sleepy-eyed wife his last dollar.
He wades the black bay to his oysterboat and sputters
into the dawn away from the sleeping town.
With shrinking shadow and twelve-foot tweezers,
he probes the bay bottom, forces mudclusters
0f oysters that clunk into his boat.
By four o’clock sun, he shakes ice from his beard and
guides his heavy boat across the bay to the dock
where he trades a harvest in wire baskets
for a palmfull of dollars.
By bulb light he pares mudbaked clothes
and steams clean in a galvanized tub of stove-heated water.
Over supper–beans and fatback, a platter of hoecakes–
the oysterman boasts to his brighteyed wife of the
Selects he tonged today. His oysters will grace
the lace and china tables of New York, Chicago,
Atlanta, St. Louis.
Watch Dawn go out in an oyster boat in WFSU-TV’s 2003 program, Our Town, Apalachicola.
As always, we would love to here from you. Leave your comments below.
Tags: Apalachicola, oyster, oystermanPosted in In the Arts | 4 Comments »
Counting the Catch
August 11th, 2010
Tanya Rogers FSU Coastal & Marine Lab
Tanya Rogers
As Dr. David Kimbro’s research assistant, I help out with all aspects of the biogeographic oyster project in the field and at the lab. David, myself, and Evan Pettis (an intern from FSU) have returned from our big sampling effort to characterize the predator community on the oyster reefs at our chosen field sites. Over the course of a productive yet exhausting week, we successfully deployed and retrieved nets and traps at Alligator Harbor, Cedar Key, and St. Augustine and found very interesting differences in the abundance and diversity of fish species between sites. St. Augustine had by far the greatest diversity of large fish species, including redfish, snapper, toadfish, flounder, jack, ladyfish, bluefish, and menhaden. At Cedar Key and Alligator Harbor we caught longnose gar, a fascinating and very ancient fish with extremely hard scales and a long toothy snout. The largest fish we encountered were black drum, which we only captured at Cedar Key. Pinfish, hardhead catfish, and striped mullet were present at all of our sites, although in varying abundances.
Evan holds up a black drum captured at Cedar Key
The other research teams farther north have just completed their sampling as well, and also have interesting results to report. One team caught nothing but meter-long sharks at one location, and another team caught 90 pinfish in their traps at one site. Once all the data are entered and compiled it will be interesting to look for patterns, and then to see how the fish communities change throughout the year.
Although the weather cooperated, our time in the field was not without setbacks of course. We discovered that two of our reefs at Cedar Key had been demolished, most likely by wayward boaters running aground, and had to select new locations. We also caught absolutely nothing in any of our crab traps, so we’ll have to reevaluate our trap usage. In Jacksonville, we weren’t able to complete our sampling as planned because the reefs we’d intended to use proved inaccessibly barricaded at low tide by an expanse waist-deep mud. Subsequently, we spent our time in Jacksonville searching for new reefs.
Local knowledge proved invaluable when trying to find suitable oyster reefs near Jacksonville. We talked to an old-timer oysterman very familiar with the oyster beds on the east coast of Florida. He was also, much to our amusement, mystified by David’s Camelbak hydration system. We spoke with rangers from the National Park Service, who had noticed, like the oysterman, large oyster die-offs within the last decade or two. We also consulted with some charismatic kayak guides, who knew all too well the difficulties of traversing the area’s deep mud. They informed us of a person who recently died after getting stuck in chest-deep mud. Suffice it to say, this made us increasingly wary of the stuff. After many miles of kayaking, we did eventually locate some accessible new reefs, but we’ll have to wait until next time to mark and sample them.
Between kayaking to our reefs 2-3 times a day, getting little sleep, as well as constantly packing, unpacking, hauling, rinsing, and trying to keep track of our seemingly endless assortment of equipment, we were all in much need of rest. We’ve now had a week to regroup and prepare for our next sampling effort, which will examine characteristics of the oysters themselves and the smaller critters that live among them.
Dr. David Kimbro’s study is funded by the National Science Foundation.
Posted in On the Reef | No Comments »
“Thicker than Water” Opening
August 9th, 2010
Roberto Diaz de Villegas WFSU-TV
We have some photos from the event, and you can see the turnout was good. The SAIL Bluegrass Ensemble played in the garden. It never ceases to amaze me how many young people in Tallahassee not only get into bluegrass but put on a good show. Inside, there were some artful cards made by LeMoyne students that could be obtained by donating, and which were intended to be sent to legislators so that people could express their concerns over offshore drilling in Florida. And then of course there was the art. Allison Jackson’s oil paintings were featured in our previous post. They depict scenes along the Forgotten Coast, or scenes featuring animals of the Forgotten Coast. Patrick Lane had some mixed media pieces, some of which are featured in the slideshow below. Their artwork will be sold and the proceeds split between LeMoyne Center for Visual Arts and two organizations, both of whom were present on Friday.
Florida Wild Mammal Association rescues and rehabilitates injured wild animals in Wakulla and Franklin Counties. Despite their name, about 60% of the animals they treat are actually birds. They provided the pieces in front of LeMoyne during the opening: representations of a bear, a deer, and four geese. In addition to rescuing animals, they educate the public on wildlife issues.
Crude Awakening Tallahassee is an organization that advocates a permanent end to offshore oil drilling, that all oil from Deepwater Horizon is cleaned up, and that the Legislature adopts a more aggressive renewable energy policy. They are organizing letter writing parties to mobilize concerned citizens to get their voices heard in the House and Senate.
Here is some of Patrick’s art. I had a great time talking to him on Friday; I found him to be pretty knowledgeable about how oil can impact the coast.
And then, a little something I thought would be interesting. When I saw Allison’s painting of two horseshoe crabs mating, I thought of how much I had been seeing that over the last couple of months in St. Joseph Bay. It has died down a bit, but I still see the occasional couple. So here is a look at art and the life it imitates:
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Posted in In the Arts | No Comments » Thicker than Water: an Exhibit of Community Concern
August 6th, 2010
The show opening tonight at the LeMoyne Center for Visual Arts has a topic close to our hearts. It’s called “Thicker than Water: an Exhibit of Community Concern,” and it features works by two artists concerned about human impact on Gulf ecosystems. The proceeds from tonight will be split three was between the art center, Crude Awakening Tallahassee and the Florida Wild Mammal Association, and the Wild Mammal Association will have some statistics on the current crisis. The artists are Patrick Lane and Allison Jackson. Allison’s paintings are featured in the slideshow above. One painting is titled St. Joseph Bay, which is of course where we are following Dr. Randall Hughes and her biodiversity in salt marsh ecology study. The first painting of the slideshow features something that’s been a common sight the last couple of months in the bay, horseshoe crabs coupling.
While we have so far been lucky in the bay with regards to oil, there is still a considerable amount of it in the Gulf, and a lot of that invisible dispersant. The situation seems more optimistic, but history shows that it takes a bit of time to fully gauge the effects of such an event. The works featured in this exhibit express the concerns of the artists about the Deepwater Horizon oil seep and about our relationship to nature in general. The artists shared their thoughts with “In the Grass, On the Reef:”
Allison Jackson
“My work references traditional Florida landscape painting, which often depicts the ideal, in order to expose a situation that is becoming less than ideal. These paintings are an exploration of a fantastical, grotesque situation that could arise from the continued abuse of our environment. Within the beautiful Florida sunsets and dawns, I present to the viewer an ecology gone awry. The Florida that I show is at once familiar and disquieting, intending to incite within my audience both a sense of admiration for the beauty of the landscape, and a sense of apprehension at what the future may hold if we continue on our current path.”
Allison Jackson was born and raised in Tallahassee. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Florida State University in Spring of 2010. She works primarily in oil. Allison will be doing a one year internship with the Yale School of Drama beginning in Fall of 2010, painting sets for Yale Repertory Theater.
Patrick Lane
“Created in response to the oil disaster, my work addresses the many factors that have contributed to the current state of our delicate waters. Overpopulation, dependency on fossil fuels and their byproducts, neglect, greed, and hope are all prevalent themes in this series. Discarded plastics and other forgotten objects are telling signs of a throw away culture of convenience. My work comes from the realm of experimentation in order to unlock the infinite potential of any given material. In this case wax, wood, metal, and plastic are simply a cast of characters that reinforce the greater visual cluster. The resulting form of this clustering is the allusion of a crowd of fish or even a school of people.”
Patrick Lane recently received his BFA in Painting and Sculpture from Florida State University. He currently helps to foster creativity to local students serving as an instructor for LeMoyne Summer Art Camp. Next, Patrick plans to travel to New York in and effort to further his development as an artist.
Thicker than Water: an Exhibit of Community Concern runs from August 3 through August 17.
If you are an artist, writer, photographer, or musician whose work is inspired by the Florida Gulf Coast, especially the Forgotten Coast, we’d like to here from you. Leave a comment below, or write robdv@wfsu.org.
Tags: art, coastal ecology, deepwater horizon oil spill, FSU Coastal and Marine Lab, gulf of mexico, horseshoe crabs, painting, St. Joe Bay, St. Joseph BayPosted in In the Arts | No Comments »
Is it over?
August 3rd, 2010
Dr. Randall Hughes FSU Coastal & Marine Lab
Since my last post, oil has stopped spewing from the Deepwater Horizon well, a very welcome development in what has been a long and grim story. Although it is tempting to feel that we are out of the woods, all one needs to do is consider the amount of oil that has entered the Gulf to realize that it will be a long time before we fully understand the ecological impacts of this disaster, much less fully recover from it.
That said, the probability that the marshes I study in St. Joseph Bay and Apalachee Bay are going to be directly impacted by oil has declined dramatically. You may wonder, were our efforts to collect “pre-oil” data wasted? The answer is no, for a number of reasons:
1. Though the marshes my lab and I have studied will likely not be highly impacted by oil, there are large expanses of marshes that already are, particularly in Louisiana. Comparisons of oiled sites in one geographic area with un-oiled sites in another area are certainly not ideal, but having data from “natural” marshes over the same time period that data are taken from oiled marshes could be useful for assessing impacts and/or promoting recovery.
seagrass wrack
2. Even if we don’t get visible blobs of oil at our sites, there are still a number of ways that they could be affected by the spill. For instance, scientists in Louisiana have found evidence of oil and dispersant chemicals under the shells of crab larvae, suggesting that these chemicals will likely be incorporated in the food chain – the larvae (and the oil) will be consumed by larger crabs and fish, who will in turn be consumed by other predators, and so on. This finding is just a reminder of one of the many ways that oil could find its way into the marsh community, and further evidence for the need for data in the absence of oil.
3. The surveys we conducted this summer to collect pre-oil data were originally part of our summer plan for a different reason: to evaluate the effects of seagrass wrack on salt marsh communities. (Although we modified our methods slightly to increase our ability to assess oil impacts – for example, by taking soil hydrocarbon samples – the data still serve their original purpose.) Seagrass wrack is a natural feature of marsh communities in this area, consisting of dead seagrass leaves that are sloughed off as seagrasses continue to grow.
Wrack is often deposited in mats along the high tide line of the marsh, particularly in the summer when seagrasses are growing (and shedding leaves) more rapidly. If these mats of wrack stick around long enough, they can kill the underlying marsh plants. Though a negative for the plants that are directly affected, this open space can allow seeds of new plants to recruit into the area. In addition, as the wrack decomposes, it can add needed organic matter to the sediment that can promote future plant growth.
Emily walking over a mat of seagrass wrack
Because wrack has both positive and negative effects on salt marsh plant communities, it is not clear what the overall impact is. In addition, relatively little is known about how wrack affects the insects and marine invertebrates that live in the marsh, or how these animals may influence marsh plant and wrack interactions. My graduate student, Emily Field, is interested in these questions, and so she has been leading the charge this summer to survey marsh plant and animal populations, along with wrack abundance, at our sites in St. Joe Bay. We’ll use our observations and the data collected this summer to design future experiments on the effects of seagrass wrack on salt marsh communities.
So although we hope to use our marsh surveys to look at wrack effects instead of oil effects, either way we’ll keep collecting data, and keep crossing our fingers that the oil well stays capped until completely plugged!
Randall’s research is funded by the National Science Foundation.
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Tags: coastal ecology, cordgrass, deepwater horizon oil spill, Florida State University, forgotten coast, FSU Coastal and Marine Lab, gulf of mexico, marine biology, marine ecology, National Science Foundation, NSF, salt marsh, seagrass wrack, smooth cordgrass, St. Joe Bay, St. Joseph BayPosted in In the Grass | No Comments »
Rehearsal is Over
July 27th, 2010
Dr. David Kimbro FSU Coastal & Marine Lab
Although we’ve busied ourselves this summer by selecting research sites and practicing various aspects of our sampling program, we have still not collected any ‘real’ data concerning the objectives of our biogeographic oyster project. Well, this post will be short because as I write this we are hectically preparing to begin said research. Coincidentally, tropical storm Bonnie has also decided to begin her work in the Gulf at the same time!
Despite Bonnie, it’s pretty exciting that over the next week three different research teams will be on oyster reefs encompassing 1,000 miles of shoreline (see map) and will perform the exact same research. If executed well, this coordinated sampling will allow us to compare how predator assemblages on oyster reefs differ from north to south.
To make sure things run as smoothly as possible, we’ve had multiple conference calls over the past two weeks to verify that everyone is on the same page and to trouble shoot problems that we failed to consider during initial planning of the project.
From the results of much horse trading, we now have the following schedule:
(1) Deploy gill nets during an evening at low tide; this gear targets larger fish and we assume fish use reefs more during the evening.
- To prevent the nets from getting caught on the reefs, causing them to not float up with the flooding tide and thus failing to ‘fish’, we are hanging the top of each net around three large PVC posts, which should be lots of fun to bring out and insert into the reefs.
- Nets will ‘fish’ for one tidal cycle- we’ll rush out at dawn to catch and subsequently release surviving fish.
(2) After processing gill net data during the following low tide, we’ll then deploy three kinds of traps (2 replicates each = 6 traps) to each reef to ‘passively’ sample relative abundance of smaller fishes and invertebrates that utilize the reef habitat. These traps will ‘fish’ for six hours (three hours after low tide until three hours after high tide) and will integrate fish usage of reefs across the portion of tide that fish are present on reefs.
(3) After processing the trap data, we’ll then rinse gear, load it onto a truck, grab a cup of coffee, and quickly (but safely) drive to our next study site to repeat the process. Having to coordinate our sampling around the tidal schedule of multiple estuaries makes this sampling feel somewhat like a relay race. But if all goes well, by next Friday, my team as well as the other two involved in this study will have collected these data in 12 different estuaries!
I’m looking forward to telling you how it all unfolded in my next post.
WFSU’s kayak was provided by Wilderness Way. The music in this piece was performed by Ric Edmiston.
David’s research is funded by the National Science Foundation.
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Tags: Alligator Harbor, alligator point, coastal ecology, Florida State University, forgotten coast, FSU Coastal and Marine Lab, gulf of mexico, marine biology, marine ecology, National Science Foundation, nature, NSF, oyster, oyster bed, oyster reef, predator, prey, science, stone crabPosted in On the Reef | 1 Comment »