Hello and welcome back to California! I’m here in Santa Barbara interning at UCSB for marine biology. I’ve been having an amazing time and it’s hard to believe my internship is almost over! This week I completed a ton of work and got to experience some very inspiring things.
This is me and one of the divers, Bella, holding the spiny starfish and sheep crab.
On Monday, our mentor Kristen, let me and my fellow Pintern Emma Galleger tag along on one of their scientific diving trips that they go on each week. We left super early in the morning and made the hour-and-a-half boat ride out to the Bullito dive site. There wasn’t much I could do to help but they walked me through the scientific diving process and told me all about diving here in Santa Barbara. They dove multiple times at that site and Kristen even brought me some organisms up from the bottom. On the first dive, she brought me a small Bat starfish (which you can see in the cover image) and a snail. After the second one, she found a giant spiny starfish as well as a huge sheep crab. The starfish has latched on to the crab and I was able to hold both of them at the same time. The sheep crab was also carrying eggs which was really cool to see. The goal of these scientific dives was to survey each transect and record the number and species of organisms within them. They also had to collect samples from several different species of kelp. After the dives were completed, everybody on the boat told me I should jump in so I got my mask and snorkel on and went exploring. It was amazing to finally see everything myself. The water was freezing but I spent as long as I could exploring the kelp forests. After they had analyzed the data and gotten out of their wetsuits, we headed back to the marina.
These are the biggest and smallest clams they had in the freezer.
Tuesday was the final day of lecture before the marine ecology class took their final exam. We learned more about marine pollution and biomonitoring which is how organisms in an environment can indicate its overall health. This was a really interesting lecture and I’m sad that the class is already over. After that, we headed into the Miller lab to continue working on ViQi. We continued working through the transects and completed a good amount. Billy Ray was in the lab that day and offered to get some of the frozen boring clams out of the freezer for us to look at. It was amazing to finally see what we had been looking at for so long in a different way.
Wednesday and Thursday were spent in the lab, completing most of the sites that we hadn’t looked at. We worked through two different ones and then checked those.
On Friday, we completed the final site for the year 2018. This means that we can now move on to checking the images of these sites in 2019. Later in the day, Billy Ray came into the lab and asked us to help him label vials so he could collect data next week. The labels were very specific and it was difficult to keep track of how many we had made for each collection but it was nice to do something that didn’t involve staring at a computer screen. We worked late and completed all the labeling so that Billy Ray could start collecting data on Monday.
These are the cryo-tubes we labeled. They are designed to be placed into liquid nitrogen.
Saturday and Sunday were spent packing up some of our things and preparing to travel back home. We will be in the lab until Tuesday next week but both me and Emma’s dads are coming out to pick us up by Wednesday. This week has been amazing and I’m sad to be leaving!
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