Alex, UR- Here Fishy Fishy!

The start of our fish seining

Good afternoon!

I will be talking to you all today about our exciting trip to Ponce Inlet and about the graph that I chose to make.

Okay, so on Friday we went up to Ponce Inlet to do our fish seining, we started at the Mangrove location and we begin measuring out where the net would go. We then, slowly walked out the net and brought it back to the beach with as many fish as we could catch. We did run into a small problem, the ground was uneven in some spots so we may have lost some fish underneath the net. We ended up catching 1,419 I believe, 7 different species of fish!! It took about an hour to count them all up and saved most of them. :)

After we counted all of the fish, we headed over to site 2, which was more in the Inlet and higher traffic area. Dr. Woodall and I took water samples while the others put out the net. Here, we had waves crashing the beach while we brought the net in which was a source of error and could've let some fish escape. We ended up only getting 1 fish species here and a few crabs, site 1 definitely had more activity than site 2.

I enjoy being out in the field and physically getting to experience everything rather than just talking about it or reading it. I think it helps me better understand the graphs and exactly what we are looking at too. For my graph I decided to go with the different fish diversities over the years. All I did was add our information from our field trip to Ponce Inlet to my other graph from the previous week. As you can see below, the fish diversity was much higher in the Inlet in 2013 & 2014 than it was for us this year.

 

My graph with our added data from 2017