Research Projects & Meetings

Today was a very busy day working on independent research projects. The day started at 8:30a picking up gear for data collection. After I gathered all the equipment I would be needing for my project, I got my gear set up to go on a dive for my research buddy's project and worked on organizing my data in Excel to make analyzing it easier when the time comes. At 10:00a, I had my meeting with my advisor to discuss how things are going with my project so far. When this meeting was finished I went straight into another meeting to talk about progress and grades for our SCUBA class. When all my meeting were over, I went back to the residence hall and put on my wetsuit to head to the water for the first of three dives of the day. During the first dive, I was helping take fish and Diadema antillarum surveys. After about 45 minutes, we headed in for an hour and half for a break and lunch. When the break was over, we headed back to the ocean all geared up to take rugosity measurements, photo points, fish and invertebrate surveys. This dive lasted about an hour and twenty minutes. I entered the data collected from this dive into my excel sheets and relaxed for 3 hours before we went back out at 6:00p to do some more fish and Diadema surveys. I finished off the day by going to the lab to start analyzing my photos to determine the percent cover of coral and algae. I didn't get very far analyzing the photos though I got all my photos neatly organized.