Dylan Radford UR, Lab Gets Interesting!

Hello class! Our previous class session was a lot more fun than the last. I have never been exposed to the way a marine biologist conducts his research like I was on Friday. Chad Macfie from the Ponce Inlet, Marine Discovery center came to talk to us about the lab that we would be participating in during the next class session. The labs purpose is to basically compute the number or abundance of fish in the Area . I am not a fisher man and I have really only fished about 10 times in my entire life so I'm not too familiar with fish biology and their identification methods. Because I didn't have much Knowledge on this it made it more interesting to see the different ways to ID a fish species by looking at its fins, Mouth, shape and teeth. Another point that I thought was awesome about Chad's presentation was when he explained the sein net technique for when we are capturing the fish. I had never seen a net quit like this, so I'm really looking forward to seeing how my lab partners and I try to control this net. The next part of the presentation was about recording your information and using it for a graph. There is a lot of information that needs to be recorded so it looked pretty overwhelming at first. After he had explain what all of it meant we used the information collected from previous years in a graph. This is the graph that I made for the information we were given.

My Graph For Previous Information

The purpose of my graph was to see how the Catch Per Unit Effort(CPUE) for changed over time in both the Mangrove and Ponce areas. From my graph I can tell that for three out of the five years the test was ran Mangrove had a higher catch per unit effort than Ponce but on the other hand, Mangroves results were more scattered where in Ponce you can see there is a positive trend. I cant wait to conduct the experiment myself and create a new graph showing different results. This will be my first lab experiment that I have ever done at DSC so I am excited and a little nervous that I will fall behind but I wont know until we go for it!