May Term Class: Marine Biology

Friday started with a lesson on the creatures that fall under the Phylum Porifera (sponges) and Arthropoda (sea spiders, crabs, shrimp, etc), as well as some discussion regarding plankton and other life in the epipelagic. All of this information was incredibly helpful as we spent the rest of the morning and afternoon at Old Dan … Keep reading »

For our second full day of class, we started out at 8am with our first marine biology lecture. We discussed differences between the open, broadly dispersing marine ecosystems and the more rigidly delineated terrestrial ecosystems, and talked about how those differences could affect the system responses to perturbations or large-scale changes. We also learned about … Keep reading »

Monday and Tuesday were our final days of data collection for our research projects. We worried that it would be rainy on Monday but we were lucky to have a clear day. Because of the full moon, the ocean was at its highest high tide in the morning. On Monday we went to Lime Tree … Keep reading »

Today we traveled with Keys Marine Laboratory personnel (Captain Bill and Captain Emily) to three nearby reef locations: Coffin Patch reef, the Elbow reef, and Volcano reef. There were many creatures to observe in each reef. We saw many hard and soft coral species, several Queen conchs (Strombas gigas), two nurse sharks (Ginglyostoma cirratum), spiny … Keep reading »

We did some traveling today and had plenty of exciting activities to keep us occupied, with even more planned for tomorrow! We started the day with a trip to the Sea Turtle Hospital and got the chance to meet over 40 turtles, spanning 4 different species. After a fascinating tour and a break to feed … Keep reading »

Today was a cool, very windy day. We started our day with lecture at 8:00am where we learned about trophic cascades. Trophic cascades can occur in the marine system when top predators are lost, often due to overfishing. The loss of predators means an abundance of prey which can change a marine community significantly. We … Keep reading »

Today was another full day of learning and experiencing the amazing marine ecosystem. We woke up for an 8 am lecture on positive interactions in the marine system. These are important relationships where at least one organism in the relationship benefits and neither organism is harmed. We also learned about the taxonomic groups in Phylum … Keep reading »

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 … Keep reading »

Today we had a late morning, which was a very nice change from our 8 am’s, but the sun called us to be up at 7am to watch the sunrise anyway. At 10am we attended the Layton Baptist church and got to meet some local residents that we had “met” in the Deep Dive documentary … Keep reading »