To make a science project work. Today I had a really packed day with the research and picture taking that I am doing. I have settled on studying the distribution of Spirobranchus giganteus on brain corals. The first step that I took was visit every single site and take an aerial view along with a 360 around the coral that I chose. For some of my locations because I had just be focused on the abundance of Christmas Tree worms I had not been paying attention to the coral so I had to move several sites. I also realized in a moment of panic that was caused by me not being able to find flag number 88 and then realizing that I had never put one down. This took a little bit of time to fix everything so I would have consistency. Afterwards I continued to take pictures and I am so, so glad that Adam was with me. It was really hard to hold a camera, the ruler I needed to scale my images to measure the diameter, make sure the image was clear, and of course staying underwater. I will admit that during the first attempt to document my first site Adam broke the ruler diving down. I kind of wish that I had a partner but hopefully when people aren't busy I can get others to help me for the rest of the week that we are here. With Adam's help we blasted through the rest of my sites and then enjoyed just floating around and watching the underwater world go by (a great option while living in paradise). I spent the rest of the afternoon enjoying being not salty and struggling with Professor Gillman using Coral Point Count with Excel Extensions to try and find the surface area of the brain coral and the Christmas Tree worms. We eventually realized that the program would be better used for transects that have many species in it as opposed to a brain coral with tiny little specks on them. We sat around and I give most the the credit to Prof. Gillman but we decided to treat each coral as an individual sphere (surface area easily calculate) and the worms which were approximately the same surface of a tiny racetrack (also easily calculated). I worked on my excel spreadsheet and made the calculations and called it a good days work.
Over dinner I found out that Natalie is studying the surface area of a sea fan that a flamingo tongue would eat over a period of time and she was also struggling image recognition software. Thankfully Dr. Gilchrist remembered that there was a girl at NCF that had done a similar research project for her thesis using image recognition software. We contacted the library and have the name now so I will try tomorrow to see if we can get everything up and running.
I have decided that sometimes on an island, people can get way too heated or caught up on really petty things that get really blown out of proportion. I know that there are always extenuating circumstances and personalities differ but as young adults that are going into the real world I think it is appropriate to go to the person who is participating in whatever offending behavior it might be, and be respectful but tell them that they are not comfortable with what is going on instead of jumping to a superior. Again, every situation is unique but that's my little rant.
Tensions were a little tight at the end of the night but it'll blow over. Buenas noches!
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