The Journey begins....

Nearly seven months and back again!

So Saturday starts my next visit overseas, this time to the South Pacific to Moorea, French Polynesia. Just a little background to all of this... as some of you know, I am a Zoology major, and have been conducting research in the department for a little over a year. I am completing my senior honors thesis on algal succession in the presence and absence of a certain fish that lives in our coral reef territories. All of my work has been through photo analysis of metal tiles that were mounted onto multiple coral reefs. A big portion of the field work that we will be doing is collecting these tiles, photographing them in the lab, and removing microinvertebrates from them. A lot of the creatures that we collect will be discovered to be new species, which is quite exciting.

I will be going to Moorea for a little under two months with my mentor, a graduate student at UF, Jada. I'll be working with her, SCUBA diving multiple times a day, and snorkeling to help aid in conducting experiments and collecting data and specimens. Jada and I are both associated with the museum on campus, and we will be collecting specimens for the invertebrate collection there. The museum is part of an ambitious new project that will be tracking biodiversity around the world. DNA is extracted from the specimens that we collect, and are put into a massive database that scientists use to link species from around the globe.

While we're there, there will also be two other graduate students from our department there that I have worked with in the past, Shane and Adrian. Shane is actually a Ph.D. student from New Zealand, but he was at UF last year on a grant.

We'll be residing at two research stations, one being the Gump Research Station (administered by the University of California at Berkeley) and CRIOBE (Centre de recherches insulaires et observatoire de l'environnement) owned by Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes (obviously, this is the French research station). Both of these stations have scientists at them year round conducting experiments, collecting data, and teaching classes. You can find out more about them at http://moorea.berkeley.edu/ and http://webup.univ-perp.fr/ephe/anglais/criobe.htm.

I think that's all you need to know for now. Hopefully, this is a good background into why I'm going there, and what I'll be doing. If you have any questions, please post them under the comments section. I'll be writing again once I get there. Saturday I fly out and I'll be spending a night in Tahiti before I take a plane Sunday morning into Moorea.

Best,
Emily