Angela - Cataloging Plastic

After finishing sampling the east coast on my quest for plastic on Florida's beaches, I started cataloging the plastic from one of my 2-quart jars. After further inspection I've decided to classify the fragments based on size (yes, I measure every single piece), color, type (e.g. "bottle cap"), and further divided them into the following three categories: 

"Ocean Plastic"

"Ocean Plastic

- "Ocean Plastic" = any plastic that has spent time out in the water, identified via biogenous material deposits

- "Visitor Plastic" = items along high tide line but have no biogenous material on them, no scratches, and the color has not faded. During my sampling I've noticed people actually setting up camp along the high tide line, thus not everything I found can be considered "ocean plastic".

"Unsure"

- "Unsure" = if someone can come up with a better name I would highly appreciate any suggestions. Pieces in this category are plastic fragments that are scratched up and have been bleached by the sun, but have no biogenous material growing on them. 

 

After dividing the plastic into the three categories I planned to weigh each with a super modern balance I picked up at a thrift shop.  It took about 15 minutes to calibrate the thing and after weighing a test item it had to be calibrated again. I now own a paper weight that looks like a balance. 

 

I decided to invest in an inexpensive portable scale that measures up to 200g within two decimal places. To my surprise, after receiving it in the mail, when they say "portable" they really mean portable. Tomorrow I plan on making a tiny tray out of aluminum foil and hope to finally weigh my plastic. If the aluminum foil tray method doesn't work, I will try to acquire the small white paper bags used by pharmacies, but that may contaminate the ocean plastic samples I had planned to give to NASA, so keeping my fingers crossed that the first method works.

Project in the lab- Seaira

This week I collected water samples from the northern Indian River Lagoon, and Mosquito Lagoon to test nutrient content in the lab. With this project I plan on comparing my findings to optimum water conditions for healthy seagrass communities. Using my collected samples I tested for salinity, turbidity, nitrates, and dissolved phosphates.To test for salinity I used the refractometer; using a pipette I was able to first calibrate it with DI water, and then put a sample of water on the slide to view the saline levels in ppt (parts per thousand). I tested the turbidity using the AquaFlour hand held Turbidimeter, remembering to continually re-suspend my sample, and clean off the outside of the sample vile. Finally I tested for dissolved phosphates, and nitrates using the HACH DR 1890 Colorimeter.Testing for dissolved phosphates was a breeze, after filtering my water sample, it was the same process we used on the boat and only took a few moments. Testing for nitrates was much more involved, it not only took 15 minutes to calibrate but it also required mixing in Ammonia Salicylate and Cyanurate reagent powders. Unfortunately a very interesting testing procedure turned into some less than exciting results, but there are still three more sample sites to test so we will see how the rest of the lagoon fairs.

Jonathan instructing me on testing for nitrates.

Lizzy - Project Update

Last Saturday I met with Rich at the Marine Science Center to fill out paperwork and to get the ball rolling on volunteering. There are still a few more steps for us to complete, but I am excited to be out there soon! I have started to think of some questions I will be wanting to ask, as well as different graph/chart types I will want to use in my final presentation.

I am curious to ask a few questions such as: "How do the animals get to the Marine Science Center?", "What is the main problem for Sea Turtles in our area and how do factors specifically in Florida's environment help contribute to these problems?", "What was the worst Sea Turtle accident recorded at the Marine Science Center?", "What common/uncommon methods does this facility use to maintain a Sea Turtle's health while rehab?", and "What distance range do the animals come from?".

Below are two examples of graphs I am going to incorporate into my final presentation. The first is talking about Marine Mammal UMEs (Unusual Mortality Events), specifically within a given area. As it is, I think this would be a good graph to compare how different parts of Florida compare to one another, or different states. Also, I believe this could be tweaked and could be helpful for comparing the different factors in a smaller range of Florida. The second expands the point of view. You could look at all of America and see what years had the most UMEs and, also, what UMEs affected what years the greatest.

Ryan Dail - Project Update

Time seems to be flying by this semester, as our presentation day is right around the corner I started to think about questions I might get asked. One question I thought to myself was how might scientists learn the age of a fish if the otolith is not retrievable? When I did my field work with the fishery biologist from NOAA we took the length of each fish and recorded the data on a specific chart.

Greater Amberjack
38 in. and about 28 lbs
roughly 2-3 years old

 For example, a red drum will reach the length of about 27 in 4 years. So if you were to find a red drum that is around 27 inches you could say it is roughly 3-4 years old. To get a more accurate age of a fish without the using the otoliths scientists use scale samples and in some cases they can tell by the sex of the fish, being that some fish can actually change their sex at a certain maturity. Next week I plan on making a list of questions I have received and really getting to know the answers to them.

Grace Project

On Friday, my father and I will be going fishing in order to have a fish to practice extracting otoliths on. Most likely the fish we catch will be a redfish for not only an easy catch , but also a more ethical one. I found that through the process of my project I have been dreading the day where I will have to dig through the lion fish head in order to extract its otoliths, hence the delay in extraction and more of a focus on research. In catching a redfish, its life will not have been wasted. It will be used for scientific practice as well as food as will the lion fish.


Future of the lion fish

Future of the redfish

My goal in extracting the otoliths of the lion fish in the near future will be to measure its age based on the rings in the otolith due to the chemistry of the water in which they swim. This project will just be dealing with the otoliths of lion fish and will answer the questions:

What is an otolith?
Do all fish have otoliths?
What are otoliths used for?
What can otoliths be compared to?
Where are lion fish from natively?
How did lion fish come to be in the Atlantic Ocean?
What do lion fish eat and how do the otoliths of their prey compare to that of the lionfish?
How long have lion fish been in the Atlantic Ocean?
How long can lion fish be expected to stay around?

 

MORE TO COME FRIDAY AFTER FISHING (:

Brittnie-I've started my coral dissolving project

Thursday I finally started my coral dissolving project. 

Adding 10 mM of HCl to containers of seawater

I had six 125 mL containers that needed to be filled with seawater and each have a different pH, to lower the pH of seawater I needed to dilute 1 M (molar) of HCl (hydrochloric acid) to 10 mM (millimolar) of HCl. 

10 mM of HCl

I did this by finding out how many mL of HCl was needed to be added to seawater to create 125 mL of 10 mM of HCl. Using this equation, 1000 mM HCl  * V_i  (mL) = 10mM * 125 mL, I found that V_i (mL) = 1.25. 

Adding 1.25 mL of HCl to 123.75 mL of seawater

My control pH was 8.07, the original pH of the seawater; to get the other five pH’s, I slowly added the 10 mM of HCl to each container, ending up with: 7.52, 7.6, 7.78, 7.91, and 8.02. 

Six containers of different amounts of pH

I used pliers to cut the coral into pieces, then I used the caliper to take three measurements of each piece, I took a dry weight of each piece, and then I soaked them for 24 hours. 

Cutting the coral with pliers

After they soaked, I took a wet weight of each piece and measured them with the caliper again. 

Finally I dropped each piece into a different container.

Measuring each piece of coral with caliper

Weighing each piece of coral

  

Tuesday I measured the pH of seawater in each container, took a wet weight of each piece of coral and measured each piece of coral with the caliper. All of the pH’s had gotten lower, the weight had increased, and the caliper measurements had decreased.

Measuring the pH

For example, my control had seawater with a pH of 8.07 and had decreased to 7.36, while the piece of coral’s wet weight had increased from 7.0569 to 7.2715, and the caliper measurements had decreased from 1-1.74 mm, 2-1.46 mm, and 3-3.07 mm to 1-1.65 mm, 2-1.33 mm, and 3-3.02 mm.

I will continue to see how fast the pH of each containers water will decrease and how fast each piece of coral dissolves.

Deanna - Project and Seining

Seining

I just briefly wanted to over our day at Ponce Inlet learning to do seining. Seining is collecting vertebrates by catching them up in net in a specific way. Then we identified each type of fish and counting how of each type. This was very interesting. I grew up in the plains and mountains, so I have little to no knowledge about the fish, ocean, and seining.

Dr. Woodall happy to be outside!

Seining net.

Carefully pulling in the net.

Looking at the catch...not a lot this time.

Got a little one there!

Chad from Marine Science Center showing us how to do this.

Got us a few this time!!

Count fast so they don't die!

Measuring the length.

After the seining was a really super part of the day. Going to the Marine Science center was very educational and enlightening to me. Again, I grew up a long way away from the ocean, and I haven't seen these types of fish before. But, the best part was petting and feeding the mantas!

Oh yeah! Too cool!!

There were some interesting things.

The mantas were unreal!

Even Jeff got in on the mantas!

Project Update

We replaced one of the pieces on our CMD (Current Measuring Device), as we didn't think that there was enough buoyancy in a swift moving current. We have to have no more than a 90 degree angle, or we have flat line data. We are also going to get another piece of PVC so we can make an extension for deeper current.

Our CMD can be used setting on the bottom...

...or by floating on the top.

Friday we will be going on the boat with Dr. Woodall and doing our 1st test. Very excited and nervous!! But reality is that most things take a couple/few times before it works and works well. Good thing we have a couple weeks!

Look in next week to see if it is a success or if it is 'back to the drawing board'!

update from Jeff

So, we took the device back into the pool. I increased the compartment size from 1 1/4 in. to 2 in. We were having buoyancy issues. Looks like it might work; also tested the wet-suit.

Well, I would like to tell you that we have clearance to the lazy river at Oceanwalk to test our device..... Sadly I can not; however, Dr Woodall went down today and played the Doctor card. We should know by Friday... and hopefully we will be calibrating the beast under a controlled environment.

Til then, we are going out on the boat Friday to take some readings with the Hack 950 Flowmeter and collect some data with the HOBO. The HOBO is the instrument we will be using to measure angular displacement or tilt. We will have to convert the data into current speed.
Note: finally, all that Math and Physics will pay off.

We will be testing data collecting tomorrow and playing with the program. We will also be modifying the apparatus to accommodate the river.

Indian River Lagoon Water Sampling - Seaira

Click here to link to a map of Seaira's Field Sampling Stations

Today I wanted to take some water samples in the northern region of the Indian River Lagoon to assess the water quality in the lab tomorrow. My field work experience was not as pleasant as I would have hoped, as the weather was rather difficult to work with. I decided that for my project I would like to take five samples from the Indian River Lagoon and test the TSS, pH, salinity, turbidity, PO4 (dissolved phosphates), nitrates, and chlorophyll a levels. Today I collected two samples from the Indian River Lagoon Persevere Park in New Smyrna Beach, this is a location at a very northern point of the Indian River Lagoon system in an area referred to as Brown's Bay. This park had a dock for fishing where I took the water sample; I used the same procedure as the previous water sampling techniques which involved rinsing the 250mL sample bottles twice, and dumping them away from my sample site. I wore gloves for the sampling, and immediately put my samples in a cooler. The second sample site I visited was in Canaveral National Seashore, I went to the end of the park which has access to the northern most tip of Mosquito Lagoon. I used the same sampling procedure as stated above. The weather conditions today may produce some error in my turbidity and TSS readings, because the water was choppy due to the strong winds. Today the winds were classified as "gale force" and were directional North at 22mph with the occasional 40mph gusts.

Indian River Lagoon Preserve, New Smyrna Beach (Brown's Bay)

Canaveral National Seashore(Mosquito Lagoon)

* Note: I did not cross over restricted areas for sampling, because of oyster and mangrove restoration projects in effect.







While out in the field I saw an abundant amount of vegetation such as Red Mangrove, Saw Palmetto, Marsh Grass(Spartina alterniflora), and Sea Purslane(sesuvium portulacastrum).
I will attach a link to Indian River Lagoon news page because it frequently reports status on algae blooms, and wildlife death. I discovered from the St. John's River Water Management site that as of October 14th biologists have recorded a decline in seagrass beds in Mosquito Lagoon due to poor water clarity, and brown tide (Aureoumbra lagunensis) blooms in the area.
For my next sampling site I want to go to Satellite Beach which has also recently reported excessive algae blooms and fish deaths in the area.
http://floridaswater.com/itsyourlagoon/currentnews.html

Rebecca - Frank Rendon Park

I was finally able to get back out to the beach and work on my project. I'm trying to determine if mole crabs prefer a certain sediment size/type for their habitat or if it doesn't affect them at all. This time I traveled south to Frank Rendon Park in Daytona Beach Shores. This is a part of the county that allows driving on the beach. I noticed right away that the sand on this beach was very hard. I walked about a quarter of a mile south from the beach ramp pausing occasionally to dig for mole crabs. I  did not find a single mole crab. I did however find tons of washed up jellyfish and a few egg cases, or devil's purses. Egg cases surround the fertilized eggs of sharks or skates.

Jellyfish

Egg Case

I decided to to take a sample of the sediment anyway to compare to the sediment where I did find mole crabs. Just looking at the samples I can see a difference between the two. One sample is full of broken shells and has a reddish-brown color to it. The other sample is your typically looking sand with no color or shells. I'm going to use the sieves in the lab to record the sediment size of each sample. I also want to record how much of the sample is biogenic, comes from organisms, and how much is lithogenic, comes from land.

Sediment Samples

Angela - Garbage Patches

April 2012 I saw my very first television clip on the Great Pacific garbage patch, ocean plastic, and the resulting debris that ends up on Hawaii's beaches. Hawaii, the most beautiful place I've had the opportunity to visit, unbelievably also has one of the world's dirtiest beaches as you can see in the video below (not the one I saw in April):

"5 Major Gyres", Image Source: Wikipedia

To my dismay I've come to learn that there isn't just one garbage patch, but because plastic gets trapped in gyres which are vortexes created by currents, there are several patches of plastic debris floating in our oceans.  The only "benefit" to this discovery is that I don't have to wait until I move to the West coast to study ocean plastic, but through this project have had the opportunity to initiate my research on our Florida beaches.  

So far, while researching whether Florida's east or west coast has more (if any) plastic, I've completed my east coast investigation and luckily have not come across a beach as littered as Kamilo Beach featured in the above video clip; however, I've found more plastic than I had expected and watching plastic being deposited with each wave hitting Pompano Beach was especially gut churning. Is one organized beach cleanup per year enough preventative treatment, or will our beaches slowly develop giant plastic tumors?