Welcome to week four! As I’m writing this my hair is still wet from the shower I took after a long morning of tide-pooling. We left for Qochyax Island at seven fifteen this morning because that’s when the tide was lowest. During a low tide you can scramble down the cliffside along Sunset Bay and walk to the island, although it’s important to keep an eye on the time because if you leave too late the tide will have returned and you’ll be swimming back. We saw several cool creatures including the tiniest little nudibranch (I’m forgetting which species, my apologies) and more purple urchins than I knew how to comprehend. On the academic front, I submitted my proposal this Tuesday and began to work on my proposal presentation for next Tuesday. I’m so excited to hear what everyone has been working on these last few weeks in their respective labs. I also finished pulling stills from the Haida Gwaii videos and formatting the file names for every screenshot into my excel spreadsheet, which is now 271 cells long. I think I’m beginning to earn the “Microsoft Excel” qualification on my resume. I then calculated the mean widths for each set of stills and the standard deviation between each width measurement. After speaking with Dr. Galloway we’ve decided that a quick way to get a sense of how significant the difference between the width mean for 10 stills versus 20 stills is a two sample t-test. This means that after conducting the test, which compares the mean of two data sets, if the resulting value is greater than 0.05 then there is no significant statistical difference between each mean, and possibly, no reason to collect 20 stills versus 10. However, if the t-test value is below 0.05, there IS a significant difference between each mean and I might wonder if I need to collect even more stills to paint an accurate picture of the contents of each video. So far my results have been well over the 0.05 threshold, ranging from 0.5-0.7, so it seems like if nothing else my data is consistent! Could be consistent and wrong, but consistent nonetheless! In addition, I counted the visible kelp in each video three separate times and began doing the density calculations (kelp abundance/area in m2). I’m still working out how many significant digits I want to include in my final density-estimates so I’ll share some more results next week. Finally, and possibly most importantly, it’s time for a round rock update!!! [pause for applause, cheering, excited utterances etc.] On Wednesday after Ytxzae and I finished a run we decided to wander down to the OIMB beach during low tide and lo’ and behold, nestled in the rocks where we left it behind last time was The round rock. We still have not decided what to do with it but after several more people suggested that we break it open in hopes of finding a highly unlikely geode or try leaving it in water overnight to see if it disintegrates, the rock has been relocated to the floor of my dorm room for the time being. It is quite an effective door stopper I must say. That’s about all I can think of to update this week but there are plenty more exciting things to come. Talk to you then!
1 Comment
Aaron
7/18/2022 05:32:55 pm
I have been wondering about the round rock! Thanks for the update.
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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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