Didi EarthTree, Marine Biology at CMIL, Week 4
Hello, my name is Didi and my internship is at the CMIL Marine Biology lab. I am working with lobsters and microorganisms. This week I learned more about how to sort and measure fish, along with dissecting urchins.
This week started out with an escaped lobster. Just when we were about to conduct a study on food intake for lobsters (which involves starving six of them for three days beforehand) three had escaped. They had lifted the thin walls between the fed and unfed sections. (The feeding section had just received an entire fish head.) The lobsters who were starving had escaped one by one through the flimsy wall, and now the experiment needed to wait three more days. To fix this situation, metal rods were put through the bottom of each slat, giving the dividers more stability. In the end, only three of the lobsters had escaped so it was fairly easy to get them back.
On Monday, while cleaning the tanks a small dead urchin was discovered. Usually, the dead urchins are thrown out but Venessa wanted to dissect it to see if it had gonads. Untill this point, the urchins who were this small did not have gonads, so she wanted to test that. When I cut it open, yellowish gonads were on the sides of the urchin. This was a very good sign because it means that they were maturing faster than previously thought. I scooped the insides out and put them with the rest of the lobster food to be eaten later.
Later in the week, we went to Fiesta Island and went seining. This is when you drag a large net along the bottom of the ocean floor and pick up any life in that area. This is commonly used by fishermen on a larger scale to catch mass amounts of fish. At Fiesta Island, however, we used a smaller net and only went over the water near the shore. Once the net had been swept across enough area, it was dragged ashore and sorted through. We measured 20 of each type of fish and counted the rest. Overall, we counted about 10 species of fish. After this, we released them back into the water with few casualties.
On Friday my mother arrived. Lulu, my aunt, and my mother all went out to dinner. As we were walking to the pizza place, we spotted some amazingly displayed fairy gardens! Later in the night, we walked around the city and stopped in different shops to look at things.
I had so much fun this week and had many lobsters surprise me with their intelligence.
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