I have spent most of this week working with other scientists' data because our own research requires a lot of data and we cannot, unfortunately, be in the field every day, week, or month generating our own data. However, thanks to the internet and data repositories, finding and sharing data is easier than ever, even if the data files are large. So for this week's blog, I took pictures of my workflow with one data file and I thought I would walk through and explain how one aspect of our scientific process looks from start to finish. 

Step 1: Determine what we need and find what is available. The first step of our process is often to determine what we need and then figure out what data are available for use. Here, we are interested in adding additional environmental components to our model that might help explain shifts in species distributions or biomasses over time. We already have temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen variables in our model, but we wanted to add marsh cover, since many of our animals--especially the juveniles--will associated with marsh edges. Often when we need to find out what is available, I run a cursory Google search or I search one of many large data repositories, querying the name of the variable and/or the geographic location, time span, or other information to narrow my search. This time, I was sent a data set from the USGS Wetland and Aquatic Research Center, which included what I needed and extended beyond my time frame of interest, which is always a nice surprise. So step 1: DONE.

Step 2: Determine how the data align with our needs. The second step of our process is to determine how the data align with our needs, and this is both in geographic space and in time. Maybe the data set includes all the years we want but is not in the right location or perhaps we are missing a few months in the data set but it covers the exact area of interest. We can make adjustments once we are aware of the limitations in the data set. One of the more interesting aspects here is the geography. When we are building our model in Ecospace, which is the spatial and temporal (geographic space and time) application in our software, we have two different geographic systems. First, we have the real world geography, which is based on the curvature of the earth, with latitude and longitude coordinates. Then we have the Ecospace geography, which flattens everything and does not account for the earth's curvature. This means that we cannot immediately upload a map file into Ecospace and have it ready for model runs. We first need to align it with our flattened geographic system, which we can do with reference maps. If we have a map from the software that we can align with geographic information, we can determine how we need to rotate or move the real world maps to create our flattened versions. You will see that the maps in the next pictures looks strange because they are rotated and don't currently align with geographic landmarks; but they will! 

In our example here, we have a vegetation map from USGS but the USGS team delineated every type of wetland vegetation. For our work, we want to know the amount of wetland in an area, so we have to perform a multi-step process to convert from true wetland vegetation data to proportion of wetland coverage. This involves overlaying our grid system on top of the map (Fig. 1), converting the vegetation layer to 0s and 1s for no vegetation or vegetation (Fig. 2), making that binary layer into a polygon so that we can calculate the percent coverage (Fig. 3), and then calculating the percent coverage and saving it as a single layer to upload (Fig. 4). I had a lot of these maps to make, so you can imagine the amount of time I spent repeating all these steps.

This week was fairly quiet at the lab, as everyone was set to work on different tasks: preparing conference talks, data entry and validation, cleaning field gear, and also preparing for the coming hurricane. While Hurricane Isaias is expected to make landfall in the next day or two, we don't know the damage it will cause or where exactly it will hit, so I spent a lot of today wrapping all our electronics in garbage bags to protect them from possible water. The university closed the coastal campuses tomorrow as we expect lots of rain and potentially unsafe driving conditions. Thank goodness our next day in the field is more than a week away.

Now, the game in this week's title is something I worked on when our lab prepared for the GCRL Community Day two weeks ago. In previous years, Kim used a PBS game called Make a Mangrove where users built a food web in a mangrove ecosystem. Users would populate the food web with plants, insects, lizards, fishes, sharks, and alligators, hoping to score points by keeping their ecosystem stable and diverse. The last time we played the game was the Community Day in 2025 and the game was unfortunately removed from the internet between then and now. As the lab put on our thinking caps for a new Community Day activity, I thought I could try to build us a new game, even with my limited computer coding skills. Thanks to some amazing external assistance, I was able to build a local food web game and a local food web investigation using important fisheries species (redfish, menhaden, oysters, shrimp) and historical environmental data. In the food web game, users get points over ten rounds for building a stable food web that is diverse and has lots of feeding connections. But watch out! The environment changes every round and may cause stress to some of the animals. In the food web investigation, users get to build a larger food web and investigate how changing salinity and temperature affects the health of their ecosystem. 

My goal with this game was to give the lab a Community Day activity that won't vanish from the internet, but now this game has become an opportunity to work with local groups to build other regional versions for outreach and education applications. I'm excited for these collaborative opportunities in the future. If you would like a chance to play the game, either alone or with a student, you can play the game here for free. You only need a computer with internet access.

See you next week!

This week, I decided it was time for a small vacation, so today and tomorrow I am out of the office enjoying the cooler weather in Mississippi. We have a lot of items coming up, deadlines, and travel, so I thought now would be a good time for small vacation. A reminder to take time to refresh so I can give my all to whatever task I'm looking toward. 

Next week is full of fun events, so stay tuned for an interactive blog post.

On the first morning of our trip to LUMCON this past weekend, we were awoken by a 5:30 am fire alarm, which wasn't great. However, since high tide had rolled in, I was able to play a game of biology I Spy with the students and we saw blue crabs, a ctenophore, and some juvenile fishes swimming around the parking lot at LUMCON. After the early morning wake up call, we had an amazing two days of hands-on, place-based marine science with water quality sampling, biodiversity analysis, and fishing. Our group of 34 enjoyed seeing everything that the Louisiana marshes had to offer and my group had a great time on the water, catching a cownose ray, a spotted seatrout, and a lizardfish. We bird watched on our way to our fishing sites, and our amazing educator Josie and I talked about the ways that the Louisiana people and its government are working to try and rebuild the land faster than it is being washed away. In the evening, I took a small group out to the docks for a sunset walk and the sky was filled with beautiful colors and no clouds. We got to see some shore birds and crabs along the marsh edge as we took in the sunset.

Not much more to report on, so I will let this slideshow tell the rest of the story. Stay tuned for more adventures in next week's blog.
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Tomorrow, I will take a group of USM undergraduate students for an undergraduate excursion to LUMCON, the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. LUMCON's main facility is in the small village of Cocodrie, LA, and sits well above the water line to protect it from hurricanes and storm damage. The facility supports student and faculty research, outreach events, and includes dormitories for visiting groups, a full cafeteria, laboratory spaces, aquaria with local marine life, areas for podcast and video production, marshland, docks, and research vessels, including the smaller R/V Acadiana that we will take out with the students to perform fish trawls. LUMCON is also responsible for the operation of the R/V Point Sur, which is USM's large research vessel.

In total, we have 32 students and eight faculty/staff members visiting LUMCON to get hands-on training in aquatic ecology, water quality and biogeochemistry, vegetation surveying, and sediment coring. We will also talk with students about how the field work is related to their coursework, how they can make a career out of the skills they gain in the field, and our faculty/staff members will share about their own career pathways. What's awesome about these MissDelta opportunities is the variety of perspectives we bring together and represent. Every one of the eight faculty and staff members is a member of an underrepresented group in the coastal and marine workforce and we all hail from different parts of the country (and world for some).

I will definitely take lots of pictures because while I will be chaperoning and supporting the field work, I do not have to lead any of the activities, which means I can be behind the camera for once and observe what our students see and say. Of course, I'll get hands on for the fishes, but perhaps I'll have one hand on the fish and the other on my camera.

Stay tuned next week for a photo drop!

Today, Kim's diversity of fishes class took to the seas to evaluate fish diversity in the Mississippi Sound and around our barrier islands. We brought almost 30 students onto the R/V Jim Franks, where we conducted two ten-minute trawls and then headed to the barrier islands for eight seine tows. The students also collected vertical water quality profiles on the ship and surface measurements on the beach to help characterize differences at the sampling locations. This was our first time using the new water quality sensor, as Kim and a team of USM faculty were awarded a grant to purchase a water quality sensor for use with undergraduate students. What's cool about this new water quality sensor is that researchers can deploy this sensor into the field, let it collect data, and then retrieve it up to 90 days later. Unlike our handheld water quality sensor, this one has internal data logging features and GPS, making it a great addition to support undergraduate classes and longer term evaluations of water quality around coastal Mississippi.

The highlights of our fishing efforts today were a good-sized adult hardhead catfish, a mid-stage juvenile and an even younger juvenile blue crab, an Atlantic brief squid, a great jellyfish that I couldn't snap a picture of in time, and lots of mullet. Mullet were jumping out of the water all around us while we fished at the barrier islands. The students will be compiling their data and then completing data analyses to understand the effects of different sampling techniques, sampling gear, and locations on the fish communities. While this is only the second time I've been present for this sampling trip, I know that the communities were quite different this time from the communities we sampled two years ago. I look forward to seeing how these communities change, or stay the same, in future iterations of this class.

I thought I'd spend this week's blog talking about what is upcoming for and at the lab so that you have an idea of what to expect in the coming weeks and months.

September is our busiest month, as we have multiple excursions and events, plus weekend trips. Next week, Kim's diversity of fishes class takes to the field to explore the fish diversity in Biloxi Bay and on the barrier islands. We will conduct fish collections to evaluate the diversity and I will support the students in their efforts to identify fishes. The following week, I will bring a group of USM students to LUMCON for our Fall undergraduate excursion with the MissDelta Initiative. We will conduct fish sampling and water quality work to understand how our changing ecosystem is apparent across multiple levels of ecological analysis. The next week, I will be giving an invited research talk as part of the USM Division of Coastal Sciences seminar series and then the next day we have the GCRL Open House. The open house is free to the public, and we will have more information to share soon, with fun for the whole family.

October is a little quieter, but we will still be busy in the lab and in the field. We have our final water quality sampling trip at the end of the month and we are also hosting Kim's diversity of fishes class at GCRL to conduct a shark lab and to explore the fish collections. I have an event I am trying to plan for October, but I don't have more to share at this time, as the event is currently awaiting approvals. The lab will also be working throughout October to prepare for upcoming conferences and presentations.

In November, the lab will attend two conferences during the same week. Kim will head to Curacao for the Gulf and Caribbean Fisheries Institute Conference, while Hannah and I head to Louisiana for the Gulf Estuarine Research Society Conference. While I'd love to go to Curacao, my research is not as nested in the fisheries space as Kim's, so I will stay stateside and represent the lab at our biennial GERS conference, where I hope to present some of my newest microplastics research. I am also hoping to have some protocols and methods written for our BlueBoat, since future research endeavors may use her in the field and I may not be around for all those trips and events.

By December, I will be hopefully wrapping up the first year of the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation's inaugural Mentorship Program and putting final touches on one or two manuscripts. I guarantee that more items will pop up between now and December but nothing major is on my radar for that far in advance. 

Exciting events are on the horizon, as you can tell, so stay tuned for all these adventures and more.

This week I have worked to make adjustments to my own model in preparation for an invited research talk and upcoming conference. While my model works well, I decided to revisit a few data points, make some improvements, and try and improve some aspects in the calibration process. As I mentioned last week, calibration is the process of using a time series of data and, often, a time series of environmental variables, to guide the model to replicate trends. When a model has a lot of data to work with, it often performs better if future conditions reflect a condition from the past. I am not training my model to predict microplastic pollution patterns of the past, but I need the model to appropriately reflect how the model groups change based on temperature and salinity conditions, so that a model group does not behave unexpectedly in forecast scenarios. 

For nearly all of the lab's modeling work, we turn to data collected by state and federal agencies as part of their independent monitoring programs. We also rely on stock assessments, which often evaluate species across the entire Gulf of Mexico (or Atlantic, Pacific) and are themselves an amalgamation of independent surveys, fishing vessel reported catches, and mathematical relationships and equations. Many of these stock assessments are freely available and published semi-frequently, so they are useful for many model groups, especially groups of key fishery species. Unfortunately, many of these stock assessments are really long and they sometimes refer the reader to another document to find the relevant information. Additionally, sometimes that data I need are presented in figures, rather than tables, so I have to get creative with extracting the data. I can upload a figure to an online tool that lets me drag and drop two x-coordinates and two y-coordinates and assign values to each. Then I can click anywhere on the figure, and the tool will tell me the x- and y-coordinates of the point based on its proximity to the coordinates I initially set. While this tool is perhaps not as exact as the scientists publishing the exact numbers, I can zoom in and work slowly to get usable information that I would otherwise miss in my model. 

I am hoping to finish up my model adjustments by early next week so that I can perform new calibrations, runs, and analyses and still have time to make any corrections before my talk in late-September. Also, we have a few exciting trips and events coming up in September, so stay tuned for blogs from our adventures on the water (and off)!

I spent most of my time this week making updates or upgrades - if you will - to two different ecosystem models. To prepare our MissDelta model for the first model scenario, Kim and I have decided to make some small adjustments to better reflect data availability. For instance, in our previous work, we started our model in 2000 even though the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources' oyster monitoring dataset wasn't robust until 2006. We back-calculated 2000 data from the 2006 data for our previous work and that model still showed strong replicability of trends in oyster biomass through time. Now we have decided to shift our model to start in 2006 to better align with these oyster data, but also to start after Hurricane Katrina, since we haven't seen any hurricanes as extreme in recent years, and we have 20 years of data to use for our model. For readers who are not ecosystem modelers: this model does not attempt to recreate the past. We provide a start value for the biomass of all of our organisms and then a time series for as many groups as possible, and we calibrate our model to the time series. This means that we make small adjustments to other values which help align the model's predictions with the observed values. A helpful way to think of the modeling process is that our model performs best when it is recreating past behaviors. For instance, if we have years of data collected during a flood event to calibrate the model, the model is likely to be able to replicate changes in biomasses if we give it a future flood scenario. Alternatively, if we calibrate the model on data where there was never a very hot summer, then the model will likely struggle to replicate behaviors of model groups during intense heat waves in future scenarios. Hence, why having 20 years of data provides a strong baseline on which to calibrate our model. 

At the same time, I have been working to upgrade my microplastics model, which still needs the same calibration process, but I am not trying to replicate trends caused by microplastics pollution. Instead, I am still working to replicate trends in model group biomasses, which will help explain how future microplastics inputs to the model area will be transferred from one model group to another through predation. Refining this model is slightly more challenging, since I am working with a subset of model groups from the larger model and since I am working with a number of model groups that do not have validated time series for their biomasses. With fewer time series, I have less data on which to calibrate my model, though I have decided to include a few extra model groups with time series to make things work. Maybe if someone regularly collected nematode data and published it, we could make better models that include our tiny animals near the base of food webs, but alas.

Stay tuned, because over the next few weeks I will provide more updates on how these models are getting on, since I have some important (and exciting) upcoming deadlines for these tasks.

This week, Kim and I traveled to Baton Rouge, Louisiana for our MissDelta annual meeting. Every year, the researchers on the MissDelta project gather to discuss our progress, make decisions on how to move forward, and hear from partners and our funding agency on important updates and considerations for the future of the project. This year, the annual meeting was hosted at LSU and I had a great time reconnecting with collaborators, talking about the work we have been doing at USM and sharing some WDI efforts that I've led with ways that we can strengthen our coastal and estuarine workforce. 

One item that I really appreciated was our team effort to identify submission and task deadlines for the coming year. In November we are starting year four of this five year project and we discussed at length the importance of having enough time at the end of the project to create meaningful stories of the work we've done over five years and how the future of the Mississippi River and the delta will affect the ecosystem, the community, and the economy over the next 100 years. 

We have a lot of tasks to do over the next year, but I am confident in the plan we established at this annual meeting, and our colleagues seemed quite agreeable to a lot of the decisions we came to during our two day meeting. Our hope is to present some of the initial results from various project components at the State of the Coast meeting this May in New Orleans. For Kim and I, that means wrapping up one more set of water quality sampling and making some adjustments to the ecosystem model, which will help align our efforts with our colleagues'. 

Stay tuned for more updates from the lab.

This week, we set out to conduct our bimonthly water quality survey amidst 90-degree heat, but clear skies and calm waters. This was our fifth survey and we, along with our collaborators, have collected and processed almost 600 water samples across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. I get to present on our initial findings from this work at our MissDelta annual meeting next week, where I will show off some surprising things we've learned so far. 

This week's trips were unique in that the BlueBoat tried to make friends with not one, but two animals we have not seen in the field. First, she was really interested in seeing if the alligator pictured here had time to talk about its car's warranty, but the gator kept swimming away from her and stayed near the river bank. We think that the gator (and another not pictured) may have been guarding their nest(s), but neither tried to ward off the BlueBoat. At another site, the BlueBoat tried to make friends with sea nettles, but she was thankfully unsuccessful. The nettles were drifting right next to our research vessel, which made collecting water samples slightly more difficult than usual. We all managed to keep our hands free from any tentacles and we now have a new set of water samples ready for delivery to our colleagues in Louisiana. 

We will go out for sampling in October and then possibly in December to round out an entire year of this process. The suspended sediments we filter out of the water samples and the dissolved nutrients that our colleagues analyze will help inform our modeling team's sediment transport and biogeochemical models, which will then feed into our ecosystem models for the MissDelta project. 

Next week, I will be driving back to Mississippi from Baton Rouge and will not get back in time to post Thursday, so I will be delaying next week's blog until Friday. Stay tuned for more adventures, though!

This week, I went on an adventure to Maine, where I was interviewing for a job. I had two days in the beautiful landscape of Maine, exploring some cities/towns, waking up to lush greenery, a gentle river, and tons of wildlife. There were osprey catching fish while I ate dinner, crows everywhere I looked, and lots of marine life. Sadly, I did not see a moose, although moose are slightly terrifying because of their size. I could not explore much, as my interview day was packed full of conversations, tours, and presentations, but it almost felt like a mini-vacation, especially since I had never been to Maine. The temperature was in the mid-70s and even in my suit I felt cool, whereas the feels-like temperature in Mississippi was 110. I think my favorite part was seeing some of the hatchery, where researchers were growing oysters, mussels, scallops, clams, and the larval lobsters pictured here. Each of these lobsters was about 1/2 an inch to one inch long, and they were zooming around their enclosure. I did not ask what the PVC and rubber tubing pictured here is for, although I'm guessing it might be shelter.

Now that I'm back in Mississippi, I am preparing for two upcoming events. Tomorrow, I leave for Baton Rouge, Louisiana to attend an undergraduate research forum, where our summer interns will present their research. Then next week, the lab hits the field for our bimonthly field work, and hopefully our last aggressively hot day on the water. Stay tuned for more fun.

Last week, our interns and I departed on the R/V Point Sur along with 10 undergraduate students participating in REU programs at LSU and 3 other scientists for a multi-day undergraduate training cruise as part of the MissDelta Initiative. We planned this cruise for the start of our REU but due to poor weather, we shifted it to last week and we got back to Mississippi on Monday. Our goal for this trip was to train undergraduate students in marine operations, science at sea, and to show them new sampling techniques and equipment that they may not experience otherwise. Overall, we conducted multiple sediment cores using a multicorer (8 cores per deployment), gravity cores, and CTD casts with niskin bottles to collect water samples for our work. Our students had a full hands-on experience, wearing hard hats and PPE to conduct marine operations, deploy and retrieve gear, and process water samples in the onboard laboratory (PPE not required). 

We conducted field operations on our way to the Mississippi River, where we stayed just outside of the river to perform some sediment coring and water sampling before sailing up the river to Venice, LA. In Venice, we welcomed aboard a group of 15 additional students and scientists who had a 1-day trip with us where they learned from our students and conducted the same field work that our students practiced the day before. It was hot, muddy, salty, but the onboard food was delicious, the smiles and laughter contagious, and the screams during the World Cup Finals loud. The students got the opportunity to network with scientists, meet other undergraduates from across the Gulf Coast, and learn from experienced research and maritime professionals about life and work at sea.

We have close to 500 pictures from the cruise, but I think this one is a contender for my favorite, as it shows the students hard at work on day 1, learning how to set a CTD for deployment. This CTD is what we use on research vessels to collect water quality data and when we lower it overboard via a winch, we can close the niskin bottles at any depth via a computer trigger to collect uncontaminated water samples. 

This week, we completed our final fish sampling field work for the summer gut content analyses projects at the lab. Our goal was to sample at five sites to get additional fishes for comparison and we were really hoping for a variety of sizes, which we certainly got. We were joined by GCRL's science communication and outreach coordinator, who snapped some amazing photographs of the team working in the field and the amazing sea life we encountered. We caught an Atlantic stingray in one of our seine pulls, plenty of catfish, some blue crabs, shrimp, and many other charismatic animals. The birds and dolphins were very happy with our field work, as we can only keep some of the species we caught, so they enjoyed an easy breakfast/lunch. The dolphin pictured here swam right up to the boat when we were tossing fish back and stayed around for both our fishing replicates at the site. Another dolphin (or perhaps the same individual) joined us at the next site and then at the end of the day, an osprey perched up on a pylon watching over the water.

Now that all of our field sampling is done, Garrett and Nikko will finish dissecting the fishes and identifying their stomach contents, before analyzing all the data. They will be presenting their work at a summer undergraduate research forum at LSU, a testament to the hard work they've put in this summer. However, before we say goodbye to them, Garrett and Nikko will join me on our rescheduled multi-day research expedition to the Mississippi River and Garden Island Bay, Louisiana. We will have full days of sediment coring, sonar deployments, and water quality sampling as part of this MissDelta research experience. I am excited to get undergraduates from all different academic disciplines in the field and to give them a taste for life as a marine and coastal scientist.

As we are leaving next week for the cruise, I will not be able to post, so stay tuned for pictures and more coming July 23!

This week, the lab took two separate trips to Louisiana. First, we traveled to Buras, LA to support a teacher professional development workshop focused on how the banks of the Mississippi River, especially the lower Mississippi River, are starkly different habitats. We conducted environmental and water quality sampling, macroinvertebrate and fish collections, and tried to conduct sediment coring on a small barrier island. Our interns got to speak about their work, they fielded questions from the Louisiana teachers, and had a good experience getting out of the lab and interfacing with curious professionals. The teachers had fun seining for fishes on the barrier island and were pleasantly surprised to see multiple dolphins nearshore and to touch a blue crab that we found on the beach.

Then today, we traveled to LUMCON in Cocodrie, LA to deliver our April and June water quality samples for processing. We got a tour of LUMCON, had lunch with the LUMCON REU students, and Kim gave a seminar on the complicated reality of how Mississippi River nutrient loading affects fish in Louisiana and how historic droughts and potential future drought conditions can shape fisheries productivity in the northern Gulf of Mexico. After all these activities, I'm definitely exhausted and grateful to have tomorrow off. Next week, we will be in the field collecting our final fish samples for the summer projects, and I should have some nice pictures as I believe our communications and outreach coordinator is joining us to document this event.

​Stay tuned.

This week, our interns finished week four of their summer research experience at USM GCRL. While we have changed our schedule and our field work because of difficult weather, our interns have adapted and still gotten some great work done in just four weeks. Already, they've gone out to collect water quality data, processed those water quality samples and cleaned up the data for cataloging, collected fish data from seining, and now they have finished conducting gut content analyses for more than 80 specimens (likely more but I don't have the data in front of me to count). They have also prepared multiple whole stomachs for DNA analysis and preserved some otoliths for fish identifications. We are in the field tomorrow to conduct another round of fish sampling, this time using both trawls and seines in hopes of catching some of our target species that eluded us in round one and in an effort to get additional data for their projects. 

Now that they are used to the gut content analysis protocol, I'm able to spend more time in my office working on other projects, but occasionally they will ask me to identify something like a cladoceran, marine debris, or the occasional polychaete. However, this week's picture is brought to you by one of our interns who has found multiple nematodes in samples, which made me laugh because I didn't expect to come upon intact nematodes in the diets of any of our species. Now while we will eventually combine the nematodes with other zoobenthos for our model, I still think the finding is helpful in showing the reliance on or use of benthic prey items in some of our target fish species, especially the small individuals we caught during our first sampling trip. 

Tomorrow I am hoping we catch some slightly larger juvenile specimens, as I know that the dissections on our 10-30 mm fishes required a lot of precise and slow work. This will also be the first time that we will be trawling for this project and we will have five of us to complete fish identifications, water quality data collection, and data recording, which may mean we can also get some good photographs in the field and I won't have to be worried about incoming boat traffic and where the BlueBoat is because we aren't bringing her for this research trip.

Next week, due to a last minute change in our schedule, I will be posting slightly later on Thursday evening than usual, but stay tuned because you don't want to miss the likely photo gallery from these next adventures.

This week, we took to the seas (rivers) for our bimonthly water quality sampling. This was our first time bringing the interns into the field for the water quality work, and they really got the full experience. Everything from the BlueBoat malfunctioning, losing research gear, choppy seas, to low boat traffic, curious watergoers, and more. We completed all our sampling despite minor challenges, and as I told the interns, this water quality work may be the most difficult lab work of the summer due to the precision required for the research protocols. The picture here is a shot of what my view looks like at the front of the boat where I have our field computer with the BlueBoat software, the BaseStation, which sends communication between the computer and the BlueBoat, and the Xbox controller for manual piloting of the vehicle all ready to go. Off to the side, we collect the water samples while researchers in the back of the boat perform a vertical water quality profile.

Next week will be an exciting week, as we head out on a week-long research cruise aboard the R/V Point Sur. The purpose of this cruise is to increase marine and geoscience research opportunities for undergraduate students, so we will be performing sediment coring, sonar profiling, water quality sampling, and a small biology experiment off the coast of Louisiana. We will have approximately 12 students on the overnight portions of the cruise and then we will have another group of students join us for a single day on the vessel. This will be a great opportunity for students to experience research on a large vessel and for the overnight trip students to experience life at sea. Because we will be out at sea, I will not be able to post a blog next week, but be sure to stay tuned because I will post when I get back with pictures from this amazing experience.

We welcomed two undergraduate interns to the lab this week as part of our 8-week summer research experience for undergraduates program. While REU is an NSF program, many universities across the United States have adopted the initialism to refer to any paid opportunity for undergraduates to work in a laboratory or field setting supervised by a faculty member. As part of a grant I was awarded to increase workforce development opportunities for undergraduate students in Mississippi, with a specific focus on Mississippi HBCUs, Kim and I were able to hire two students to work with us for eight weeks this summer to complete a diet composition study for 8 fish species that are somewhat data limited for our ecosystem model. We will be collecting fish, dissecting them, and analyzing their stomach contents to determine what they are eating and in what proportion. 

This week, I planned on training the undergraduates in our water quality methods and then we were expecting to go to do our bimonthly water quality work on Wednesday, Thursday, and today. However, due to a small craft advisory and coastal flooding, we were unable to go out for this water quality work and we have pushed it to next week. Instead, we took our seine nets out and completed our first round of fish collections at three sites across the Mississippi coast. While the winds and waves were strong, we pushed through and caught a lot of fish, including a lot of our target species, which we brought back to the lab for the summer projects. You can see a snapshot of our frozen samples here. We also answered lots of questions from curious community members, including questions about the mating horseshoe crabs at one of the beaches. One of the biggest learning moments of the fishing trip was the importance of fishing multiple times at the same location. At our final site, we caught more than 100 fish on our first replicate and then less than ten on our second replicate.

Next week, we will spend most of the week in the field for our bimonthly water quality research, but we will be back to complete more fish work throughout the summer. We have multiple trips planned so that we can collect data at various times across the summer, at multiple locations, and using a few different sampling methods to try and generate as comprehensive a data set as possible. Stay tuned for more adventures on the water!

All fish collections were possible under MDMR Scientific Research Permit SRP-008-26 and fish sampling protocols under approved USM IACUC 25082602.

This week, or really the very end of last week, we got the BlueBoat back with her final upgrades. Our amazing colleague who has been outfitting the BlueBoat to make her research-ready retires in a few weeks and we asked for a few small additions and modifications before he enjoys retirement. Pictured here is the BlueBoat with her three new features: handles for easy retrieval and carrying, additional cable security and waterproofing, and side bumpers to protect the BlueBoat from scratches if she runs along the research vessel. Our colleague also added protection around the metal A-frame to prevent accidentally cuts, but the protection impeded the sensor housing so I had it removed. We also upgraded our computer and purchased a Rough Book to make field work more convenient. Previously, I had been using my work laptop in the field and while we didn't have any major problems, our Rough Book is more weather and splash resistant than my work computer. These upgrades will come in handy as I set out in the field next week for our June water quality sampling trip and then I will bring the field laptop when I cruise on a multi-day expedition a few weeks later. More on that multi-day cruise in a later blog.

One item that we couldn't upgrade due to timing and slightly due to the availability of materials is the long cable you can see on top of the BlueBoat wrapped around the extension cord reel. This cable connects to the power box inside the protective gray case, which gets power from an onboard battery and provides power to the nitrate sensor that we mount on the stern of the BlueBoat. However, this cable is 25 meters long (82-ish feet), so it takes up a lot of room on top of the mounting platform. I had hoped that we could find a way to store the cable in one of the pontoons but the challenge is that the cable would have to enter AND exit the pontoon through two different waterproof entry/exit points. I found two options but neither were large enough to fit the cable and I don't feel comfortable drilling holes into this vessel to create a workaround. There are companies that sell the cable we use in smaller sizes so we could perhaps purchase a smaller cable and solve the challenge of having excess cable on the BlueBoat.

This week has been a busy week but we've mostly been writing papers, making revisions, and crafting a grant proposal at the lab. Unfortunately, none of these are the usual exciting updates I provide. I will, instead, talk briefly about Kim's great idea and how Hannah and I tested a prototype and will hopefully be testing the updated version soon.

When we go to the field to conduct our water quality sampling work, we perform three sets of data collection and/or sample collections. We complete a vertical profile, where one or two team members lower a multi-parameter water quality device slowly to get readings every 0.5 or 1.0 meters, depending on the water depth. The water quality device has a digital screen that shows the team member(s) various measurements as the device goes through the water, and the team member(s) record those measurements on our waterproof data sheets. At the same time, our BlueBoat uncrewed surface vessel drives itself across the water to collect surface measurements every 1-2 minutes. Here, we are gathering more points at the surface to help our hydrodynamic modeling team and we are collecting an additional variable that our multi-parameter device cannot record: nitrogen (nitrate). Nitrate is a limiting nutrient in the ocean, which means that a lack of nitrate limits the growth of primary producers, like seagrasses and phytoplankton. Too much nitrate, however, causes algal blooms, which you've likely heard about in the news, as these harmful algal blooms often occur off the coast of Florida, when excess nutrients end up in coastal waterways. For our work, understanding the amount of nitrogen in our water and its distribution helps us understand the primary productivity in our system and informs the base of our food web model.

The third type of data we collect in the field for these water quality trips are water samples. As most water quality meters do not have sensors for important nutrients like nitrate, nitrite, sulfate, and others, we instead collect water samples at the water surface, mid-way down, and right above the bottom of the water column to send to our colleagues who can analyze the nutrients in the lab. For these water collections, we lower a LaMotte horizontal water sampler, shown in the picture here, until we get to our depth and then we let the metal messenger slide down the rope which hits two latches and seals the ends of the tube, trapping the water sample inside. We can then bring the device to the surface, open it, and quickly transfer the water to our labeled sample bottles and get it on ice as fast as possible. We need to get it on ice quickly because the microbes and phytoplankton in the water sample will continue to use the nutrients in the water unless we can slow down their metabolism by cold shocking them. A major challenge we have been experiencing with this device, however, is that the river and ocean currents we experience during sampling occasionally cause our water sampler to drift. This means that the exact depth of our sample may not be consistent and can lead to possible challenges when we need to interpret our nutrient data. After some searching, we learned that others don't seem to have this challenge or if they do, they aren't reporting. 

Kim had the great idea to attach weights to the LaMotte and we purchased two flag counterweights, which are 1lb waterproof bags that won't hang when we attach them to our water sampler. Earlier this week, Hannah and I tried attaching one with rope to the water sampler and we successfully took the device in the field and collected water. We did find that the counterweight was not exceptionally secure, but we did notice the whole process was easier and the device was vertical in the water. After thinking about how to improve our prototype, I got zip ties and fastened the counterweight to the LaMotte, which I hope keeps the counterweight more secure. I'm not sure if the 1lb weight is going to be enough weight, so I will likely be adding the other counterweight to make one heavy sampling device rather than two moderately heavy devices. This will reduce our sampling speed but our goal is to improve accuracy, which may come at the cost of speed. Our first true test with our new device will be in two weeks when we are in the field for our first summer field sampling session, and I'll let you know how it goes.