There was beautiful 80 degree weather this Monday morning, and we started off the day with guidelines for creating a research project at 8am. Today was more of a work day, keeping busy with creating research questions and writing a research proposal. I worked on taxonomy and classification as well for about an hour or so, and took a break and walked around the docks with Annalise. We identified species that we knew, then saw an iguana and fed it some leaves.
The class was divided into research groups, and each group focused on a research question based in the habitats we have already visited here at our time in the Florida Keys. Each group created methods and data analysis that will be completed in the remaining two weeks. We presented ideas at 2pm as follows:
Gwyn, Alexa, & Elijah: “Species Richness Present in Ball Sponges at Shore and Off-shore Sites in the Florida Keys”
Annalise: “Effect of Refuge Space for Maintaining the Population of Caribbean Spiny Lobster (Panulirius argus)”
Amy: “Urchin Lytechinus variegatus Response to Predation in Seagrass Beds”
Lauren, Erica, & Dakota: “Relative Abundance of Brittle Stars in their Preferred Habitats”
Skylar, Richard, & Seja: “Thallasia testudinum and Sponge Density in the Florida Keys”
Each project is so exciting, and we are eager to start our research in our various locations! After our presentations, we were then able to continue writing our proposal paper that was due at 8pm. We had some delicious stuffed peppers for dinner, and we all saw a lovely double rainbow due to the heavy rain that occurred while we were eating. A key lime pie was made and given to Jody as a belated Mother’s Day gift for being such a great motherly figure for all of us. I had finished the day watching the sunset and doing more taxonomy work, but overall our day was pretty successful in getting a list of things done!
-Amy Baca, ’24
