Since my last blog post I've been out with Robert (other intern who works with Alyson) collecting green crabs with Gabby's interns Nicole and Mark. Even Peter came out and took some pretty awesome photos of us again (unfortunately I don't have them yet). My fear for crabs has yet to go away but I still tag along for crab hunting and try my best to help out, typically carrying the bucket of crabs and paper work. So a few days later we ended up giving a presentation for UNH Cooperative Extension about what we've been up to. I haven't gave a presentation in quite some time so of course I was a little nervous, but thankfully it came naturally because I'm talking about something I'm passionate about. If you did want to check it out, you can click here.
We also went out one early foggy morning to try and do some beach profiling in Hampton. However fog and looking for the horizon do not go hand in hand. As time went on the fog became thicker and went more inland so eventually we had to give up. I talked about beach profiling in my presentation but if you haven't looked I'll mention it again. It's a technique used to measure the changes in the contour of a beach. We typically use the emery method where we have two rods and line up the rod farther away from the shore with the horizon and line it up with measurement on the rod to capture the change of elevation. The further rod takes the closer rods spot and we repeat the process until we get to the shoreline. It's quite fun and not too hard once you get there hang of it.
Below are some other photos of me beach profiling at one of our sites in Seabrook with some volunteers.
Roberts main focus for his internship if setting up a protocol to monitor the success of rehabilitated areas/paths in sand dunes. So for a couple days we were back in the dunes laying our transects and collecting data at Harbor Side Dunes in Hampton. We laid out 3 transects in each category, path ways, vegetated and rehabilitated. Path way is the common path everyone still takes, vegetated is where it's all natural with minimal human disturbance and rehabilitated is where there use to be a path but was planted over to help restore the dunes. Overall it was pretty neat we saw so many different critters and learned about different plant species. Below is my new favorite photo I have taken, looks wayyyy cooler on my phone.
We also recently went on the Great Bay Discovery Cruise thanks to Dari and Julia. It was a super neat and refreshing experience. We started off at the UNH pier in Newcastle, while out at a sea we caught some phytoplankton. Wow I knew there was a lot of phytoplankton but seeing hundreds in just one cup on water blew my mind. We eventually went up the bay and checked the temperatures, salinity, oxygen levels and a ton of different stuff. After that we went to Jackson Lab and Gabby talked about green crabs and just about anything you can think of. While there I helped her intern with her recent green crab catches from today. Now I can say I've seen boxes with literally hundreds to thousand of crabs 🦀. I can't tell if I'm still intrigued or disgusted because my gosh did they smell bad. Well that wasn't the end of the cruise, we did some otter trawling afterwards and caught the biggest green crab I have ever seen. Probably the size of my face... We caught 2 flounders, so many crabs and different fish. Overall super cool experience and can't wait to do it again one day. Below are some photos I took on the cruise.
P.S. I don't have weird style when it comes to how I like the structure of my photos. I have yet to fully learn the quirks of this software.
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