Programs Blog

May 31, 2023

Makenna Keyek, University of New Hampshire

Ship’s Log

Location
Oahu, Hawaii

Weather
Sunny and hot with scattered sun showers

All blogs from S-309

The day started out bright and early today with a 6:30 am breakfast time. Students and staff ate their breakfast and packed a lunch for the day before loading the vans around 7:15 am. Once everyone was in the van, we were off to our second attempt of your first reef survey!!

After about an hour ride, we arrived at a beach called 3 tables up on the North shore of Oahu. For our reef surveys, we break the big group up into two separate groups, port and starboard. The first group to get in the water was the port group! In each group there are three separate jobs for people. Before any of the work began, the transect, or where the students would be collecting their data in the general area, would be set up and this length was 10 M. The first of these jobs is the chemistry group. The job for this team is to collect water samples and make sure that it is being rinsed out properly. The next job was the fish and invertebrate team. This group had to count all of the fish and invertebrates along the transect as well as swimming around for 20 minutes and counting them as well. For the last team, there goal was to take photos of the bottom of the sea floor every 1 M using quadrants which help analyze the results once collected. While the first group got to go out in the water, starboard got to sit out on the beach and relax. I got to read a bit of my book and lay out in the sun. Once the port group was finished with collecting their data, my group went out and repeated the same process. While we were in the water, the port group was doing some chemistry on land so that we can analyze the water samples to use for our data collection. Once everyone was out of the water, we all ate our pre packed lunches! Our group then did some chemistry on land while the other group got their time to relax before we packed up our stuff and headed back to our home base. 

Some students working together to identify certain species on the seafloor that the benthic team captured photos of during today’s reef survey

Once we returned, we all were able to have a few hours of down time to shower and nap before we all came back together to debrief our snorkel and analyze the data we collected. It was difficult to identify some of the species on the sea floor but working together we were able to identify all the species we saw! During this Jeff brought us some delicious dinner! Looking forward to tomorrow to be able to see Seamans for the first time!

I am having such a good time with this amazing group of people and I cannot wait to get out on the boat and start sailing!!

Hi Mom Dad Bella and Nik! I miss you and love you all so much. Can’t wait to tell you guys all the fun things I’ve been doing. Hi Owen and family as well! I miss you all, hope all is going amazing back in New Hampshire! 

Makenna Keyek, University of New Hampshire