Hi everyone, my name is Tahlia Trevino, and this is the second week of my internship at the Miller Lab at UCSB. My internship is studying marine life along the coast of Santa Barbara.
Monday, June 26
Today I started my week with what the people in my lab call the TRAITS project, which is where we go, and gather species of kelp from different spots around Santa Barbara called transects. Then we take them back to the lab to clean and analyze the kelp. The gathering of the kelp is used to get a knowledge of how the kelp is doing and what is living on it. This takes all day as we have to go out on the boat and collect the kelp, look for little organisms, scan the kelp, and collect pieces of the kelp for DNA labs.
Tuesday, June 27
Today I started my day with a lecture from the class I joined with my mentor. In this class, we are learning about the ecology of the marine-land interface, which covers everything from the function of the ocean to the species that live in it close to the shore. In the morning, we have a lecture, and in the afternoons we have a lab in the field, and this happens on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Today we learned about ocean basins, including how they were created and their different parts, and we learned about ocean circulation, especially on the Santa Barbara coast. After the lecture, I went to go work on my project in the Miller lab identifying the species in the images on the database ViQi. Later that day, I went to my first lab for the marine-land interface class, where we collected data from beach hoppers who live on the sandy beach. In this lab, we identified the different species of hopper, their sex, and their different sizes.
Lab for Marine-Land Interface Class
Wednesday, June 28
Today was once again a TRAITS day, so we gathered kelp and studied it. However today didn’t take very long, so I was able to work on my project in the lab, and I found various species today that were very interesting and hard to identify. After being at the lab, I went to the beach and watched the sunset with my roommates.
Thursday, June 29
Today I started by going to a lecture where I learned about waves and tides and how to calculate optimal wave function. Within this subject, I learned how waves were formed and what factors influence their different sizes and functions. After the lecture, I went to the Miller lab to continue to work on my project and learn more about the different species in the different transects in Santa Barbara. Then I went to lab class, and we did another lab involving beach hoppers where we gathered hoppers to study for research papers the students will be writing on their functions based on size, sex, and species.
Marine-Land Interface Class
Some of my notes
Friday, June 30
Today I continued my work on the images and I did calculations based on the data we had gotten from the images and the studies on the animals. It was time-consuming and involved a lot of precision to find the average amount of a species by percent mass. We used Excel for this so we could make it more efficient and faster to work with. My mentor and I will be interpreting the data next week!
Saturday, July 1, and Sunday, July 2
Saturday I got up very early to go to Carpinteria Salt Marsh which is owned by UCSB. The salt marsh is an estuary, where both salt and fresh water meet. We went out there to collect data on the species in the marsh. This was my first time going into a salt marsh, and it was an experience. It was very muddy, and there were so many animals and plants out there, so the abundance of life was overwhelming. We first looked at the different species of plants and learned about how they helped this ecosystem thrive. However, we also learned about invasive species which are harmful to the salt marsh environment. Then once we got closer to the sea wall, we got out our tools to core down into the marsh and measure out the different species. It was dirty work for sure and you had to get down into the mud to find the different species. We saw snails, clams, shrimp, crabs, and polychaetes. We also saw a bunch of predatory birds like hawks and snowy egrets. After the salt marsh, I went to the Sea Center in downtown Santa Barbara where I helped out by teaching and handling tide pool animals such as sea urchins, sea stars, and sea cucumbers. It was a great experience, and I got to meet a lot of people who were eager to learn about marine life. On Sunday I went shopping with my roommates and then later went to the beach and went paddle boarding which was super fun but was also a full-body workout. Overall an awesome week at my internship!
Carpinteria Salt Marsh
Crab found at Marsh
Beach Day!
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