A Symphony of Skeeters


The limousine pulls up to the opera house...


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Florida Bay: Beneath the Surface

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Florida Bay consists of mud banks so intertwined it takes an experienced boater (or a great GPS chart tracker, if you’re me) to successfully navigate across the bay.   Because flow is somewhat restricted by these mud banks, the basins have developed into unique habitats making each dive of the FCE-LTER seagrass sampling project quite different.   At each of the LTER sites within Florida Bay, we estimate percent cover of all seagrass species and many calcareous green algal species, as well as red, brown, and other green algae.   We monitor water quality over time via nutrient analyses in seagrass and calcareous green algal tissue, and we collect data on salinity, temperature, light penetration, and water turbidity.   Data are located at www.fiu.edu/~seagrass . Sprigger Bank is our monitoring site located at the western border of the bay where salinity is more stable than that of eastern regions.   Sprigger Bank is characterized by dense turtle grass ( Thalassia ...
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Marsh Madness 2015: Swamp Sixteen

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A bit behind schedule due to "rain delays" in the sawgrass fields of play (i.e. I'm just now getting to it. Not sure if it's actually rained out in the 'Glades the past two days. We'll just assume it has). Anywho, the Round of 32 is done and gone, and with only 2 voters many of these matches came down to a coin toss game of chance. You have your bracket below for SWAMP Sixteen. A review of the matchups: Vertebrates: Alligator 1  vs. Anhinga 9: An easy win for the alligator despite little interaction between the two animals: one basked, one dried its wings. The real  competition was between the two side's cheerleaders: Allie and Anne. Snook 5 vs. Roseate Spoonbill 13: The spoonbill sneaked through using its charisma and mistaken identity as flamingo to its advantage. Green sea turtle 6 vs. American crocodile 3 : I really have nothing to say about this game. Ibis 10 vs. Florida panther 2: Wow! I think the voters/teams mistakened this matchup for UM vs. FIU....
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What the inside of an alligator smells like

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Ever wonder what an alligator's breath smells like? One of the perks of my research is I get to hang out within sneezing distance of the amazing reptiles and I can tell you from first hand experience that their breath smells like death. Two of the major questions I try to answer with my research is what do alligators eat in the coastal Everglades and where do they eat it? To get at these questions, I use two different techniques: stomach contents analysis (SCA) and stable isotope analysis (SIA). For SCA, me and my team catch alligators at night using high powered spotlights and steel snares attached to long poles. Once an alligator has been caught and its mouth taped shut, we bring it up on board our boat, strap it to a long wooden plank so it can't move, place a PVC pipe into its mouth to hold it open, and then thread a tube down its throat and into its stomach. The other end of the hose is attached to a water pump which we use to fill the gator's stomach with water, and t...
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