A Wonderful Summer

This summer was my first field season with the CMR lab and it was a once in a lifetime experience. I spend most of my time in the lab identifying corals, sponges, algaes, and more for various research projects but I never realized how much depth the pictures lacked. Diving in the ocean for the first time showed me an incredible underwater world that looked nothing like the pictures I had worked on for months.           

 


 The reefs were absolutely stunning but still we saw debris and trash on the reefs and in the water and it really solidified the need for us to work towards preserving the reefs. The main project I worked on was taking time lapse pictures of both natural and artificial structures to determine how different fish utilize different structure types. The staghorn coral is a species that is dramatically decreasing in the Florida Keys and we are hoping to prove that the structure it provides is essential to fish communities and is therefore worth the conservation efforts to save it.



Overall I had a wonderful summer and I miss the days where I spent most of my waking hours out on the water just enjoying the beauty of the sea and the diversity of life it holds.