A Delayed Summer Plans Update

This week we were all busy bees in the lab and I realized that I've been moving so quickly that I forgot to write about what we are doing this summer. I noticed that a few weeks ago I said the next blog would be about summer and then I spent the following few blogs talking about other exciting events. So this week, I'm officially unveiling our big summer lab plans.

Our summer is packed full of research, hands-on experiences, collaborations, and new field work. I will be starting the summer off by supervising the bi-monthly water quality research, and Kim will be absent for this trip for the first time. I will be leading our two interns and Kim's graduate student, Hannah, as we collect our samples and filter them at the lab. This will be our interns' first research with us at the lab, and Hannah and I will be training them by going to the bayous at the lab and practicing as if we were on the boat. The week after our water quality field work, we will be collecting fish specimens along the Mississippi Coast for the gut content analysis work that our interns will focus on this summer. We will drive to multiple places and bring our target species back to the lab for future analysis. The interns will also work to quickly get our water quality filtration gear ready for the field again, as we will be leaving for a multi-day research cruise and we will be collecting and filtering additional water samples. I am the co-chief scientist on this cruise, so I will be teaching undergraduate students how to collect and process seawater for nutrient analysis and I will also be working with them on species identifications for fish and mud animals that we collect from various activities on our cruise. We will stop in Louisiana to pick up a group of day cruisers, including Kim, who will join us for a full day of research aboard the ship but who will not stay overnight.

We will also support a Louisiana teacher professional development workshop where K-12 teachers will learn about Neptune Pass, a new crevasse within the Mississippi River, and about the fish, shellfish, and flora that call the Mississippi River and coastal Louisiana their home. This is an exciting opportunity for me, because I get to bring both my science and education brains together to work with teachers on integrating local science into their classrooms. Kim and I enjoyed this opportunity last year where we worked with teachers in a Louisiana wetland and supported curriculum development and local ecology integration.