Week One Location: Pensacola

Over all I had a blast at UWF it was pretty cool getting to see all of the neat things that within the area. Its was especially nice because now I have many new places to go visit when I go home to Pensacola after this class finishes. 
Monday was all about the streams that ran through the area. I learned many new things that day. The high light of that day was visiting the Perdido River later that day, because I got to dip net for the first time. Even though I never really found anything.

Tuesday was an adventure in it self. My group started at Perdido Bay and got to learn key techniques in surveying a marine environment. Most notability the collection of bacteria and how the samples are treated with a mixture of TCA and Lucene so that we can see how productive those bacteria were within an hour time period. Afterwards my group went to Big Lagoon where most of us learned how to pull seine nets for the first time. The high light of this part of the day was when Bailey discovered a baby sea horse.


Wednesday was a very long and busy day for us, but that didn't stop us from having fun. To begin we pulled many seine nets at Pensacola Beach. We spend some time identifying many organisms one of which was a tiny puffer fish.  Then we went across the road to the sound side where most of the group learned about salt marshes. I however, along with Sabrina and Darren got to help a grad student attempt to collect data from this site. A storm began to roll in shortly after so we packed up the gear as fast as we could and headed to a new location close to Ft. Pickens state park. After being there for awhile we were given some free time which I used for snorkeling. During this time I was able to watch a school of large fish past by as well as discover a fish that has 'wings' that it would display if it felt threaten. I learned later that it is called a sea raven. Soon after we had dinner afterwards we ventured to Ft. Pickens were we learned about sea turtles in general as well as how light effects both the adults and young. That night was pretty interesting to say the least. 

We used the last two days to wrap up the week with putting together presentations on our given subjects as well as analyzing our data that we had gathered the previous three days. 
The week at UWF was a great week and has made me excited to see what I'll get to see in the next week.