Dylan Radford UR, Just Keep Swimming!

Site 1 Sein net

My Graph!

Hello class! The lab that we all participated in on Friday was my very first lab experiment that I have ever conducted at DSC and it was a blast! Besides it being a little cold in the morning the day turned out to be a beautiful one. I think one of the more interesting things about the lab was the sein net and how Chad was able to use the net with the help of a few other students to catch the fish. Like I have said in my previous posts, I don't have a fishing background so this was a very new type of fishing for me that actually worked! Not going to lie, I didn't think we were going to catch any fish but at the first site in just about 7 minutes we were able to catch 1,384 fish of different species and 35 blue crabs. I was amazed how many we caught and how chad was able to identify them when we were counting. My favorite part of the lab was sitting down on the benches and doing all of the calculations together because I started to understand the importance of doing these kind of tests and what kind of information you can take from it. Not to mention I have lived in Daytona all my life and had never been to that part of the marine science center and it is pretty cool. After all of the experiments, we were asked to create a graph that compares our information from site 1 of 2017 to the information from site 1 of a different year. I decided that I would compare the CPUE¹ from 2016 and 2017. The reason I chose to compare our information to the information of the 2016 class was to see the difference in the abundance of fish in that area of the two years. After creating my graph I was able to tell that the CPUE¹ (standardized for the area sampled) for 2017 at the Mangrove site was 0.2541 more than the CPUE¹ of 2016 from the same place. This graph also basically says that the fish in the given area were more abundant than the previous year. This is awesome because we had a lot more success than the last class to conduct the experiment.
     I am glad that I decided to take this lab because I have never had an experience like that and it has really amplified my interests in the Natural science field. I cant wait to conduct more experiments so I can explore other things that I may not know I would have interests in. I also believe that we have a great class that works together and gets things done as a team so it can only get more fun from here!