Hello! The fifth week of my internship here on coconut island has gone by incredibly fast. Much of the work I have done this week has been similar to that of last week. We took the volume and mass of each of our coral fragments for the week and later put that data into a spread sheet. We will hopefully use this data to contribute to a paper on the results of the flow experiment. Many of my housemates this week have been busy with the spawning of the Montipera Flabalatta and Montipera Capitata species. One evening I went to help some friends who were working on preparing and testing coral sperm and eggs to be cryogenically frozen for the future. I haven’t quite grasped many of the tools and things they were working with, to do this yet but hopefully during my last week I will be able to learn more about this. While I was there I mainly helped count coral eggs, but it was still very fun!
This week Miranda and I went to a practice session where one of the PhD students here on island, defended her thesis on phenotypic plasticity of several species of Pocillopera corals around the Hawaiian islands and how her work could be relevant in other places as well. This was a very interesting thing to watch, and in many ways helped me think about what I would like to do in the future, if I were to go for a PhD or masters. I hope that her final presentation to defend her thesis will go well when she presents next week on the UH Manoa campus.
On Saturday some friends and I drove up to North shore for the first time and went on a beautiful hike, then later went to the beach for some poke. I am sad that I am heading into my last week here but I hope to learn and do as much as possible before then:)
There are no comments published yet.