Trips to Louisiana

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.