Second Week at UNF

This second week of this course at UNF introduced us to a habitat that would be monitored for a 24 hour period at GTMNERR where water quality samples were taken every hour, seine pulls taken every three hours, and the observance of organism behavior as the tides changed. It was really interesting to see how everything was effected over this time where different organism abundance was observed throughout different times of the day. When low tide was present, organisms gather into smaller places due to the restricting habitat that made them easier to collect in the seine nets. Overall, it was quite challenging because the lake had a few feet of nasty hydrogen sulfide containing muck that we had to dredge through to collect our seine samples.

Another interesting adventure we had while on our week trip was our boat trip up the St. John's River where we also collected water samples at five different sites, starting where most of the river was freshwater upstream. As we collected our samples, we noticed the change in turbidity as well as salinity for each site traveling downstream leading out into the Atlantic Ocean. We were able to see all the commercial and industrial impacts located along the river that could effect the water quality in the area. We were able to eat lunch under the 295 overpass past our first sampling site where we observed wildlife and the scenic areas of the river.