Role: Research Assistant I

Seagrass beds face stress from grazing during urchin blooms and scarring from propellor blades. The Ecological Memory (EcoMEM) project seeks to understand the impact of these stressors on these ecologically and economically important habitats in St. Joseph and St. Andrew Bay in Florida by experimentally applying grazing to scarred and unscarred plots in seagrass beds across two differing geographical locations.

The part I play in this effort is in processing dipnet samples collected across EcoMEM’s grazed and/or scarred or control seagrass plots. I store meiofauna samples and use compound microscopes, ID guides, and dichotomous keys to sort, identify, and count each and every organism found in a tray. I then take the wet and dry weight of each unique taxonomically identified and store them for further genetic analysis.

For this project I gave a conference talk titled “The effect of simulated grazing on the community structure in seagrass ecosystems” at the 2026 Benthic Ecology Meeting in Norfolk, VA.