Role: Assistance in field, small boat operator

The water in Louisiana is turbid and difficult to see through. Thus, new technologies are being tested to improve our ability to study the ecosystem and its biodiversity. One of these techniques uses underwater microphones, or hydrophones, to record the sounds marine organisms create and analyze the spectrograms created by bioacoustics. This sampling technique is being compared to traditional sampling by crab traps and gillnets on an artificial reef near Trinity Island.

My role in this part was small boat operation to handle buoys attached to hydrophones and gillnets as well as occasional field assistance swimming with SCUBA divers to record location and time points for datakeeping.