After snorkeling around for a little while I came across a small ledge in five and a half feet of 87.4°F water at the coordinates 24° 40' 16" N and 81° 44' 40" W. I set my Biocube over the corner of the ledge with the GoPro filming for several hours then extracted the sample and brought it to shore. After a long night of sorting and photographing I returned all of the specimens and came to a species count of forty-eight (without the GoPro footage), the same as the Biocube in the Atlantic. This was shocking to me with the recent research on how destructive the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico had been and the impact that it left on the waters.
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Olivia Cohen
Welcome to my blog for my senior project, An Investigation in Marine Biodiversity: Florida Keys. Over the summer I will be conducting four Biocubes (further explained in "About") in several locations in the Florida Keys. |