by Claire Mueller
As the communications intern for the Movement of Life Initiative, I’ve had the pleasure of doing a variety of fun projects, but my favorite was accompanying our marine team this winter to Fort Pierce, Fla., to continue their work with Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute at Florida Atlantic University. Our mission was to tag as many bull sharks and cownose rays that we could with acoustic transmitters, allowing us to collect location data and determine the movement patterns of these two species.
When I arrived in Florida on January 14, I first caught up with Chuck Bangley, a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), and fellow SERC intern Michelle Edwards. They had been there since the previous Wednesday, and already had managed to tag four cownose rays and two bull sharks. Matt Ogburn (our fearless leader and principal investigator of SERC’s Fish & Invertebrate Ecology Lab) and Jay Fleming (the professional photographer documenting our expedition) joined the team on Monday night.
My favorite day of the week was undoubtedly Wednesday. We met at the boat at 6 a.m. to load up and trailer down to the lower St. Lucie River, where we’d try our luck catching our target species. The team was dragging a little—we’d had a long field day on Tuesday without too much excitement (only one small bull shark), and the morning temperatures were a little chillier than expected. But as we traveled to our first sample site and the sun began to peek out above the clouds, I began to get excited about the impending field day.
