A Week in Alabama

Mid-blink while I talk as fast as possible to convey all my research in a lightning talk at Gulf Con. Photo credit: Kim de Mutsert

As the title suggests, I spent this week in Alabama for Gulf Con, which is the largest Gulf of Mexico conference that features scientific research, technological innovation, and education and community support across four days. The entire De Mutsert lab presented work at this conference and we got to hear about really awesome research done across the entire Gulf of Mexico. This was my first time at this conference, but I made some really valuable connections with other oyster scientists, environmental modelers, and field researchers. It turns out that our research team isn't the only one shocked by the lack of environmental data for the Mississippi Sound but we also aren't the only ones collecting these data. One of the conference highlights was connecting with two different research teams who are performing similar water quality monitoring in two different areas of our model area and who have agreed to share their data with our hydrodynamic modeling team.

I had the pleasure of hosting a session with Kim on impacts from acute, chronic, or multi-stressor effects on the Mississippi Sound and Bight, and enjoyed insightful talks across physics, chemistry, and biology. One item I really appreciated from our session was a well-respected senior scientist presenting on work that he hadn't considered important approximately a decade ago. He recently re-evaluated some conclusions he made from his earlier work and tested some of his assumptions and learned that perhaps he was hasty in his assumptions. I enjoyed hearing his honesty about his decisions and the new work that he presented is an important reminder that we can change our minds as scientists if we have new data to support a different hypothesis.

I also got the chance to reconnect with some colleagues and sat through 4 hours of microplastics talks, which included unique approaches to microplastic removal, detection, and good conversations around how we as a microplastic research community should move forward to create standardized sampling and analysis methods, a problem that is really apparent in microplastics research. While I didn't get a picture of the conference staff in the crayfish or starfish costumes, I'll instead share a nice picture my boss took while I was giving the fastest talk on my work, since she and I each had 7 minutes to present findings from two different projects.

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