Thursday, June 12, 2014

Thursday June 12th
Location: Imperial River

Today we went out on two boats to retrieve some lift nets that we had put out on Monday. The net was a square with the dimensions of 67X67 cm and a mesh size of 0.3175 cm at the lower area where benthic organisms will be funneled when the net is pulled up. We placed three nets in close proximity to each other at three separate locations in the Imperial River in east coast Florida near the Florida's Gulf Coast Universities' Vester Field Station. All nets were held in place with PCV material and two sites used oyster clumps to assist in creature immigration. When we pulled the nets we collected all material within the net and put them in separated bins to count back at the lab. When we arrived back at the lab we began to collect specimens from our samples and identify the different species. What we saw was tons of crabs!! They were by far the most dominant organism within the shell clusters with some other fish,  gastropods and crustaceans mixed in too. Once we finished our counts, we entered all the data into Excel and observed the species abundance and diversity.
The crew hard at work

We got crabs!!

It's all about teamwork

Our catch, junk and all

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