Week spent at UWF

What I liked about my time at UWF is the fact that we were given  hands on experience with tools needed to conduct and an actual filed research experiment instead of the standard lectures just telling us what chapters to read or what material is going to be on the next exam. This week has open up my mind to a few new ways in which I can learn.
It was my first time ever trying to pull a seine net to try and identify what species is unqiue to that ecosystem and how abundant that species of fish is within an ecosystem. What we found was that majority of the fish species that were captured and identified for the marine ecosystem were the Inland silverside, and Pin fish . These two fish species out numbered the other fish species for every pull of seine net. The sites in which the samples were taken were along the shores of the Big lagoon, Gulf of Mexico (beach) , Santa Rosa Sound, and a Salt marsh pond. The seine net also shows an areas species diversity. And what was found was the fact that the beaches along the Gulf of Mexico held the highest species diversity amount the areas sampled. This is probably due to the biotic and abiotic factors affecting a species distribution, not allowing one single species to out compete the other with the lack of adequate refuge to hide form predatory species. Unlike that of the Big lagoon and Santa Rosa Sound which had a high abundance of flora and geographical barriers protecting the young juveniles. These two natural biotic and abiotic factors and  lack there of strong disturbances allows one or more species of fish to out compete the other by allowing the more dominate species to place a foot hold within said ecosystem , there by giving that species of fish all the nutrients offered by the ecosystem proving the competitive exclusion principle.

The picture on top shows the use of a seine net use  to capture fish samples in the Gulf of Mexico and the bottom picture shows the identification of the species of fish.