Hi everyone, I just completed my third week here in Santa Barbara and it has been amazing!
On Monday, Sam and I spent the day working on ViQi and continued to identify clams. This day we found other interesting creatures like this funny fish giving us the side eye. After work we went to the beach to read and eat snacks. We ended up staying so long, that we didn’t end up realizing the tide was rising, and ended up getting drenched.
Tuesday we started the day with a lecture taught by Kristen Michaud about rocky intertidal ecosystems. We learned about how upper limits in an environment are set by an organism’s tolerance to desiccation, basically how long a organism can survive to harsh living conditions. Lower limits are set by competition between organisms. during the lecture we saw many examples of these limits through experiments by past scientists. We also looked into other topics like predation, competition for space, and keystone species. After lecture we returned to our little office space in the Marine science building. Its always freezing in there, every time someone comes in to get something off the printer they tell us its freezing in there. After finishing another transect on ViQi, we got ready for lab, and headed to meet up with our classmates. For this lab we went down to Gaviota and sampled species of invertebrates in different salinities. We found bugs nicknamed Toe bitters, water boatmen, and many other species. We found this one male toe bitter with its back covered in eggs, that thing was nasty. Overall during lab, we were able see the transition area where streams meet the ocean and how the salinity of an area affects how many species can survive there. 
On Wednesday we came into work and met Billy Ray, another scientist from the Miller lab, who had a new project for us. So Billy had set up some cameras in specific areas looking at clams, and left them there for a week. He had asked us if week could go through all of the frames of footage to see if the clams were filter feeding and record the data into a spreadsheet. So I spent most of Wednesday imputing basic information like the date, the camera that was recording on, frames, total frames, and clam ID before I could even start to look at the clams and input data. Once I finished inputting all the basic information I started looking at each frame and recording filtering clams with 1s and non-filtering clams with 0s, so eventually Billy can construct a code to better understand filter feeding clams.
Thursday started with the s
econd half of our rocky intertidal lecture by Kristen. This time we focused on the principle of competitive exclusion, which states, two species can’t coexist if they compete for the same limited resources in a habitat and other ecological factors remain the same. We looked at the effects of competition, predation and other factors play into this principle. We also looked on the effects of marine heat waves to the rocky intertidal and how the heat wave was killing off important species that keep the ecosystem in balance. After lecture we went back to lab and I finished looking through all of the usable frames on camera one. For lab this day we met up with our class at some bluffs in Isla Vista and went digging for shells in different levels of the substrate. From theses samples we were able to figure out what types of organisms used to live here and what the environment might have looked liked.
We got to keep some of the shells we found, I took some for my friends who love cool shells.
Finally on Friday, we went into lab to continue our projects. Before I could start working on camera three I had to go through and add a seventh row for another clam for each frame. Mind you each day has 288 frames. This took me about 4 and a half hours. Believe me if I had found a faster way to do this I would have, this sucked. Finally when I finished that I could start going through all the frames on day one of camera three. I wasn’t able to finish the first day but that’s a project for this new week.
Saturday we did our weekly apartment cleaning. Then we went to a premier league soccer match between Wrexham AFC and Bournemouth AFC at the university stadium. It was so much fun!
Today we biked to target to get our weekly groceries. We might go to the beach later too. Can’t wait to share week four!!
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