Hurri-can't you see I'm busy?

This week's rather short blog is brought to you by Hurricane Ian, which hit Florida the other day. While I was far away from the event, hurricanes are a major concern throughout the state, given their unpredictability and capacities for major damage. We hurricane prepped throughout the state, evacuated individuals at the epicenter of the hurricane's landfall, and waited out the storm (note: many people are still waiting out the storm right now). Hurricanes are likely a source of microplastics deposition in coastal systems, as Dr. Ingels and I wrote in our recent manuscript, and blow land-based debris into the ocean that likely won't be recovered. Hurricanes can also cause damage to coastal urban infrastructure, which will get worse as climate change increases the severity of tropical storms.

For me, while I had a full week of research planned on the marine lab, I had to change gears slightly to ensure the safety of everyone at the lab. Sean prepared as many samples as possible before the lab closed, so a few days off won't make much of a dent in our research. Luckily I'm not planning field work or trying to go to the Tampa Bay/Sarasota areas, where damage was pretty severe. Instead, I will spend this weekend working through data from the nematode communities in the St. Andrew Bay (Panama City) samples, and I will be looking to gain a better insight into what the prominence of specific nematodes mean about the health of the St. Andrew Bay ecosystem. While there are multitudes of data points to work through, a big part of our job in writing manuscripts is to extract the information we find most important or unique and build a narrative around those data. We unfortunately can't talk about everything we find because it would take too many pages, lose the reader's interest too quickly, and take too much effort for not much reward.

Tune in to next week's blog to learn more about the nematodes from the St. Andrew Bay area and get an update on the microplastics experiment that Sean and I are working on.