Christian Vinciquerra, Lab with Annie

Last week in lab had two groups. One at Tomoka State Park and the other at DSC lab. I was at the lab, and we all had to bring in water samples. We were instructed by Annie Roddenberry who works for Florida Fish and Wildlife. She first went over what is plankton and phytoplankton. Then we moved onto chlorophyll and how it works. We used our water samples to do a  chlorophyll extraction which we first found the salinity of our sample using a refractometer. Then we used Fisher Maximadry vacuum pump to suck your sample through our Whatman glass microfiber filter 47mm to collect any suspended solids. We ran the vacuum twice and put both filters in 20 mL of acetone to extract anything that was collected on the paper. After 20 minutes of soaking we put both of our samples in a Aquafluor Fluorometer. 

Chlorophyll Graph

The reading from the Aquafluor tells you how much chlorophyll is in your water sample. From the graph, you can see that Crypress Lake is by far the most chlorophyll out of all our samples. From this you may think that the lake is blooming with life compared to the rest. Many of the rest were taken from salt water areas that have much lower levels, but more close together in average such as the two boat ramps. We also encountered a negative number from DSC Fountain. Even Roddenberry was confused by this and appears as a rare phenomena. 

For the rest of the class, Roddenberry went over what we are doing next class. We are doing seagrass surveying down in Mosquito Lagoon. She went over how the process works and what we will actually be doing. She showed us some of the tools and how long the lines are to measure the seagrass then wen over the measuring square that we be measuring the percentage of seagrass present and how much seamers is in a certain area.