The Vester Field Station is right on the water! We have a
pool, canoes, and most importantly free laundry machines available to us!
On
our first day, we split into two groups of six: canoers and boat riders. The
canoeing groups set out to three different sites within the estuary and used
oranges and a GPS to track and calculate current. Meanwhile, the boat riders
drove to the inlet, where the estuary meets the Gulf.
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| Dr. Douglass explaining mangrove systems. |
Our group took CTD, YSI,
and refractometer samples to test top water salinity, conductivity throughout
the water column, temperature, and turbidity at seven different sites.
Unfortunately, our YSI stopped working after the second site. We did not find
out until later that our CTD stopped working halfway through our sampling.
Lesson learned: bring several spare batteries when going into the field for the
day! At four of the seven sites, we started an experiment using dip nets. We
spread out three dip nets at each site, sealing them to the benthos with PVC
pipes and by placing oyster clusters atop them.
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| Zack securing dip nets with PVC pipes. |
We will collect the nets on
Thursday. Our last sampling activity on Monday was soil sampling. Zack and me went into the mangrove swamps to randomly select ten sampling sites of wet
sediment (five samples at each of two different sites), which were marked with
a PVC ring and a red flag. Initially, salinity was tested within the site by
ringing the sediment through cheesecloth so that the water would land on the
refractometer. The samples were weighed wet, then dried overnight.
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On Tuesday
we put the samples into a muffle furnace to burn off the organic compounds,
leaving an inorganic sample to be weighed; all three weights can be used to
calculate percent water and percent organic content of the soil samples. The
sites will be revisited on Wednesday to re-test salinity and conduct further
testing on atmospheric carbon dioxide fluctuation and the rate of respiration.
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