Winter on the Water

On Monday, joined by two of my fellow grad students, I set out on the water for the winter sampling trip in Panama City Beach. The weather forecast called for rain and rocky waters, but we managed to have a day that was dry and calm...and by dry I mean the weather. By the end of the day I was covered with saltwater and mud, as expected. We started our drive to Panama City Beach as the sun was coming up, and as you can see below, we were still on the water when the sun was setting. We were too busy working to get pictures, but thanks to Rachael, we got the two shown here. By the end of the day I was pretty battered and bruised, cut up, and exhausted, and I think that Schyler and Rachael felt the same way. We managed to get the work done and it was great to introduce other graduate students to the type of work that I do. Even in a field like marine biology, I find that people don't have a strong understanding of what it means to conduct sediment coring.





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I haven't been able to get a good picture, but thanks to Rachel you can see some of the environmental concerns in the Panama City Beach area. The polluted water way that I expect to have high concentrations of microplastics is also facing inputs from a chemical plant, a shipyard, and a paper mill. The water quality is quite low, the smell is acrid, and I expect that the nematodes living in the sediment will have high pollution tolerances. I am looking forward to the next few months because I will spend every week processing more samples to see if there are differences between the fall and winter sediments. Stay tuned for all the weekly updates!

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