New Skills with a Hint of Nostalgia

With the acoustic files double-checked and the humpback whale mating season winding down, my new assigned task is research to build up further educational resources for future programs at the center.  This information should become useful aids for learning about not only humpback whales, but also, the history of Puerto Rico and its people, the ecology and species diversity of the island and surrounding waters, and its geographic and climatic features. 

The object of today was to create a catalog of collected seashells.  This was only the second time that I have used a camera that is not strictly point and shoot, so I found putting setting adjustments into practice to be quite challenging, especially without knowing which buttons or dials made these changes.  The first fifty or so pictures taken by my acoustics' partner and me were either black or blinding from the flash.  We eventually became more comfortable, after lots of fiddling with the settings and downloading the user’s manual, and created clearer, identifiable pictures.

Once we had completed photo shoots with a small line up of shells, we commenced the identification process.  I found myself really appreciating the library of identification guides in the small book shelf at marine station in Ireland, since, now, there were none at our disposal.  I used a combination of Google images, websites with uncertain credibility, and scientific-based websites for cross-referencing.  Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but I feel that they don’t always capture the subtle detail necessary to make a positive id.  However, I was hard-pressed to find any sort of physical description for the majority of our specimens.

The work did bring me back to the marine station, as I remembered sitting at a lab bench in front of a microscope after a long day of surveying and hiking, trying to figure out how an alga that looked so distinctive could take an hour to identify.  It always felt so good, so rewarding, especially after that length of time, to declare with certainty that Latin name...and continue onto another specimen.  Ah, those were some good times!