Wading Through Research

During my first year as a graduate student, a week didn't go by where someone didn't ask me "So what's your research question?"  I hated that question more than anything.  I had combed the literature, searching for research ideas, only to discover everything I was interested in had already been done a hundred times over.  All of the mysteries of the environment had been answered and there wasn't anything left to be studied.  "Why am I even here and why are any of us doing science," I frequently asked myself.   "Ecology is stupid.  Ecology is hard.  I hate Ecology!" were also common chants I shouted in my office (and by office, I mean the spare lab next door that was used for storage and sleeping quarters for homeless grad students).  Then, one day, it suddenly all made sense.  I realized I was being punished by my adviser, because he was punished by his adviser, and his adviser's adviser punished him, etc. etc....

Greetings from St. Paul, Minnesota!  I have left the sweltering heat of south Florida for a few days to attend the American Fisheries Society Conference .  Attending conferences is a must-do for graduate students.  It's a chance to share your research with a large, scientific audience, get feedback from the top scientists in your field, and make connections (and new friends) along the way.  These meetings can be a bit overwhelming so I've generated some tips to help you get through them:

Greetings from the confines of my office!  I have not posted in over a month but lucky for you, the other bloggers have kept you entertained with Alligator vomit , post-quals stress disorder and the joys of working with carcinogens, flammable materials and high-voltage equipment .  If those don't make you want to be a graduate student and/or scientist, then I don't know what will! So what have I been doing?  A whole lot of non-exciting blogging material like processing DIDSON videos , analyzing data, and preparing for conferences.  The good news is now I have some results to share!  

For those of you who read Using "Sound" to See Underwater  and Everglades at Night ,  you've learned a bit about the DIDSON (an imaging sonar) and have gathered that some of my work occurs at night in the glades.  Below, I'll explain how I'm using the DIDSON to understand the role of predatory fish in canals of the Everglades.

Here are a few short videos taken at night at my research sites.  Pardon the video quality as these were taken with my cell phone.  I'm a little rusty on my frog calls so can anybody identify these sounds?  I think I hear an alligator in the background too.  Make sure you turn the volume all the way up otherwise you may miss it.  Comment below if you can identify the sounds and bonus points to the person who can give the scientific name! 

When I first tell people I don't need my eyes or a video camera or even light to see under water, you can imagine the look on their faces and the numerous questions that immediately follow.  Instead, I "look" at fish using a sonar - a Dual Frequency Identification Sonar (DIDSON) to be exact. Dual Frequency Identification Sonar The black cord connects the underwater DIDSON (above) to a computer  on the boat.  This allows me to watch and record everything the DIDSON "sees." Without getting into all the technical details of the DIDSON (visit  the company's webpage  for that), the sonar emits sound-waves that "bounce" off of objects (such as fish) and then return to the unit with information on how far the wave traveled and the "intensity" of the object it hit.  The DIDSON then uses that information to create an image.  Now it's worth noting that the image it creates does not capture information on the color of the fi...