The Inaugural Coastal Experience Trip: Part 2

This past weekend, we had our amazing coastal experience trip. Fourteen students and three faculty joined me at the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory for a weekend of hands-on research in coastal and marine science. This project, funded by the NASEM Gulf Research Program, aims to increase diversity in the coastal, marine, and geosciences workforce by providing hands-on research opportunities and paid internships to students from underrepresented backgrounds in these research areas. We partnered with two Mississippi HBCUs to accomplish this goal and to provide semi-local opportunities for these students that are closer than opportunities offered by our partners at Louisiana-based MissDelta institutions.

Our weekend consisted of a pre-field excursion learning and brainstorming session, a Blue Tech Field Day, a graduate and post-graduate student panel, and beach seining. For the pre-field excursion, I taught our students about the MissDelta Initiative and how changes along the Mississippi River will shape future changes in fish and shellfish communities in the northern Gulf of Mexico. The students brainstormed the types of data we should collect while in the field to help understand the local drivers of changes in marine communities, and they did a great job coming up with ideas without ever seeing the data collection technologies we'd use. We spent most of Saturday on the water collecting plankton samples, completing two otter trawls, performing sediment grabs, and collecting water quality data to inform our other sampling. I think the students were most excited about the dolphins that followed the boat and the dolphin that kept diving behind us while we were conducting an otter trawl; the dolphin likely ate well that day. The students also got the chance to use some marine technology and complete some seafloor mapping using remote controlled boats with ping sonars attached. After taking a long rest post-field day, we invited three speakers from USM to talk about how they got into grad school, their research and experiences, and how the post-undergraduate path is not necessarily linear. Our students got to ask questions and get some advice about next steps, which I think provided a nice activity after a long day in the field.

On Sunday, we took the students to the beach to conduct some seining to collect additional data on fish and invertebrate communities within the Mississippi Sound. My plan was to allow the students to fish for about an hour and then to return to the lab to analyze the data in an activity I created, but our students were having so much fun, that we let them fish for two hours. They seemed to enjoy competing with each other to see who could catch more fish, who could identify the most fish, and who was the best at pulling the seine net. The group I worked with really enjoyed when a juvenile blue crab grabbed onto my thumb and would not let go. For many of these students, it was their first time stepping into the ocean, and seeing their joy, smiles, and hearing them laugh and watching them get so hands-on with the fish and invertebrates brought the faculty members such happiness. Of course, I was too hands on throughout the entire weekend to get any decent pictures, though my colleagues got lots of photos that I am still waiting on. Instead, I will attach the picture of the anomaly our student captured in a sediment sample. We aren't 100% sure what this is, but he pulled up a surface sediment grab and there was a distinct color and texture difference between the silt, the clay, and this black substance. We contacted the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality to report it, since it had characteristics of oil, and they may be looking into it further. The students were super excited, though, to see how all the faculty and our marine education staff members reacted to this unexpected component.
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My next step regarding our workforce development project is to visit JSU to talk about my science career and to announce, in detail, our summer program, where students can come work with Kim and I to build their hands-on research experience and collect samples and data to inform our northern Gulf of Mexico ecosystem model. We also will start planning another round of this coastal experience trip for this upcoming September or October, and I can't wait to bring another cohort of students to explore the wonders of our local marine communities.

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