debor042

Greetings from the confines of my office!  I have not posted in over a month but lucky for you, the other bloggers have kept you entertained with Alligator vomit , post-quals stress disorder and the joys of working with carcinogens, flammable materials and high-voltage equipment .  If those don't make you want to be a graduate student and/or scientist, then I don't know what will! So what have I been doing?  A whole lot of non-exciting blogging material like processing DIDSON videos , analyzing data, and preparing for conferences.  The good news is now I have some results to share!   One of the most interesting and surprising things I've found in my DIDSON videos is schools of small prey fish (< 12 cm).  Not just one or two on occasion, but nearly every time I go out, in all three of the canals I work in, there are schools.    Some are small (you may need to make the video full screen to even see them): Others are quite large: Some are hi...

When one thinks of a student doing research in the Everglades, one would assume that the researcher is an outdoorsy type who could never thrive in an office or indoor work environment. Part 3 of this series, however, is about grad student offices, which is where some of us actually spend the majority of our time. If you haven't been keeping up with this series, you can learn more about the other aspects of grad student life in Part 1 and Part 2 of "Grad Student Life Beyond Fieldwork." The picture above is my office, which I currently share with 3 other Earth and Environment grad students. Because I am working on writing my thesis proposal, I’ve recently been spending a lot of time here. You may notice that there are no windows because scientists apparently hate sunlight. You also may notice that the space was likely a lab before it was a grad student office. That means that at some point in the room’s past, the space may have contained heavy metals, carcinogens, rad...