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This guest post was written by Phil Matich, a graduate researcher in Dr. Mike Heithaus' lab at Florida International University.  _________________________________________________________________________   We just got back from an amazing trip in August!   As always, we left early in the morning and were fortunate enough to catch the tail end of the Perseid meteor shower as we drove to the boat ramp.   On our way to the field site we saw the sun rise over the water and the mangroves, and then got right to work catching sharks.   On the first live, we caught two sharks, 79 and 85 cm total length, and surgically implanted the smaller individual with an acoustic transmitter so that we could track its movements.   Surprisingly, the larger shark was an individual we had caught and tagged in July, and is one of the first sharks we’ve recaptured in the last three years!   After only a month, the shark has grown 2 cm and gained 1 kg in body mass; the scar fr...

I've always been fascinated with the names of places and the history behind those names. Why is Paris called Paris, and why did somebody in Texas feel the need to use the name again? Why is the big rock in the middle of Australia called Uluru by the native Aboriginals and why did a white guy rename it Ayers Rock in the 19th century? The coastal Everglades is full of fantastically obvious (Mud Lake) and wonderfully enigmatic (Willy Willy) place names and I have bumped into many of them during my research. Here is a list of some of those places and where the names come from (or at least where I think they come from): 1. Shark River: There are sharks in it, though they are not easy to find sometimes. 2. Coot Bay: For many years I had no idea how this bay got its name or what a coot even was, then one day while driving through it early in the morning I saw a flotilla of water birds (at least a couple hundred strong) sitting together on the bay. They turned out to be coots from t...

I'm just going to go ahead and say it: graduate school is great (though  The Simpsons disagree ). We're given 2-9 years (depending on whether you're a masters or doctoral student and the scope of your research) to live in a cozy academic bubble surrounded by like-minded peers doing research on things we think are interesting and important. We teach, we write, we think, we analyze, and we get to explore new places and meet really smart people. We don't have tons of extra responsibilities like kids (usually) and onerous administrative crap, and we're given some room to fail every once in a while (the most important part of the scientific process). Sure graduate school can be frustrating, annoying, and just plain idiotic at times, but that's pretty much a definition for life. Let's not get bogged down in the mundane. But the question I've been asking myself recently is, what's next? What comes after graduate school? I'm planning on graduating with ...

Guest post today from a new member of the FCE community! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Howdy ya’ll! I’m one of the newest members of the  Trexler lab , here all the way from Houston, Texas. I finished my Masters in May, which focused on reproductive life histories of small stream fishes. In addition to working in some amazing clear water East Texas streams, I have a love/hate relationship with springs in the beautiful West Texas Chihuahuan desert. But, life hasn’t all been unicorns and butterflies; I’ve worked in my share of dumpy freshwater sites. However, nothing prepared me for what I was to endure in the Everglades.  Don’t get me wrong, I am in no way suggesting that the Everglades are “dumpy,” but rather mysterious and frankly, comedic. This past summer I was lucky enough to (literally) get my feet wet in the Everglades. I was excited, yet terrified. In Texas, alligators eat peopl...

I've always had a passion for animals, particularly large animals of the dangerous variety (big predators), but before I started my PhD I had never really spent much time thinking about alligators. Now, after working with alligators in the coastal Everglades for the past 5 years, they are one of my favorite animals. Let me tell you a few reasons why: 1. Alligators can get really big.  The largest alligator officially recorded in Florida from 1977-1993 weighed in at 1041 lbs. Alligators can get so big that they can take down adult deer, like in this picture taken in Georgia by Terri Jenkins, a US Fish and Wildlife Service district fire management officer. The gator in this picture is "only" 12-14 ft. long. 2. Alligators can change their digestion rates. Alligators eat large meals (like whole deer) fairly infrequently, so it's to their advantage to be able to slow down their metabolism when they have nothing in their stomach to save energy. However, when they do eat a ...

One of the great joys of science, in my view, is teaching others about science, how it works, and why it is arguably the most advanced type of problem solving ever invented by humans. As graduate students at FIU we are given ample opportunities to pass along our knowledge, expertise, and love of science to the next generation of scientists (undergraduates) through teaching classes, giving public lectures, and directly mentoring individual students. At last count FIU had about 40,000 undergraduates enrolled, so finding motivated students to help out with graduate research is a relatively easy task. After five years in FIU's biology PhD program, I've had the pleasure of mentoring eight students for various lengths of time (six FIU undergrads, one Ursinus College undergrad, and one Miami-Dade high school student). They've assisted me with data entry, data analysis, lab work, literature research, and even field work in the Everglades, including alligator catching. In return, be...

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...

To study American alligators that live in the coastal Everglades you need to be a bit of a night owl. Alligators are much easier to find and catch at night because their eyes glow bright red when you shine a spotlight at them, whereas during the day they blend in amazingly well with the water and the vegetation because of the sleek, low profile of their bodies.  Fortunately for me, my natural sleep patterns involve staying up late and waking up around noon. Even with the natural advantages of my sleep patterns, this type of research is easier to carry out if you camp out in the Everglades because you can quickly crash in your tent after a long night of alligator wrestling rather than making the long haul back to shore. Everglades National Park provides a surprisingly large number of great camp sites for researchers and fishermen to use. One type is called a "chickee," which is a very simple wooden platform that sits on stilts above the surface of the water. Photo credit   The...