Today is Friday June 24, 2022 and this marks the last day of my first week at OIMB! When I flew in last Saturday I wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew I’d reread the suggested packing list at least six times and still managed to forget a towel until ten minutes before heading to the airport; I knew there would be other interns but I didn’t know they would be so lovely and welcoming; I can point out the Oregon coast on a map but I didn’t know how gorgeous it is in person! It’s safe to say that so far my experience has been all-around positive. The first morning after the REU’s arrived I heard the meal-time bell at 7:00 AM for the first time. I imagined waking up for breakfast would be more difficult but the sun rises at around 5:30 here so I’ve been waking up alongside it most days. A highlight of Day One was when we took a group trip to explore the OIMB beach and discovered an almost perfectly round rock. We’re not sure how its existence came to be but after a quick debate on whether to try and crack it open (mere minutes after finding it I might add) we decided to leave it behind. If we ever manage to go back and find it again I’ll be sure to update the status of the rock here. We spent the rest of our free time playing basketball, and ping pong, and doing a little bit of picturesque hiking. Switching gears, I was introduced to my lab partner for the summer, J’mie, and our mentor Dr. Galloway. Our first project was to sort through about 600 stills captured from diving footage collected along the benthic zone of the island Haida Gwaii, and record the number of sea urchins present. The purpose of this project is to test the feasibility of analyzing video data as a method of surveying the species present in a kelp forest. As J’mie and I count the urchins we also record the time it takes us to complete each set of images, and in the future we will compare our results to gauge our accuracy. There are three species of urchins in the photos so I’ve spent the last couple of days getting comfortable telling them apart. The first is the Purple urchin, (Strongylocentrotus purpuratus), which are the rarest in the data set and have the most uniform spines. The second is the Red urchin, (Mesocentrotus franciscanus), these are the most common and have the longest and most irregularly patterned spines. The third is the Green urchin, (Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis), these have the shortest spines and sport stripes along their test (the central body of an urchin). I finished sorting through the urchin images yesterday and today I’ll work on developing my individual project that I will derive from a facet of the diving data set we already have!
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AuthorHello! My name is Catalina, welcome to my blog! I am a rising Junior at NYU pursuing a degree in Biology and I'm from Sunnyvale, California. This summer I am working in Dr. Aaron Galloway's Coastal Trophic Ecology (CTE) lab developing video survey methodology applied to kelp forest monitoring. Thanks for reading! Archives
August 2022
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