Day 25 - Our last lecture

It's now afternoon on Weds 5/29, and things are starting to wind down for the first ever BYU-Idaho Marine Biology Field Experience.  Oh, don't get me wrong, there is still a lot to do, but this morning we had our last lecture.  We spent about 2.5 hours discussing human impacts on the sea.  You know, fisheries, pollution, introduced species, climate change, etc.  It's too bad that the last lecture topic of the trip is so sad, but it's an important one to touch on.

On the happy side, in honor of our new class pet, I shared a children's book with the class before we started today's class meeting.  It's called "I Was All Thumbs" by Bernard Waber (also creator of "Lyle, Lyle the Crocodile").  It's about an octopus that lived with in a tank in a scientist's lab...anyway, the book is now out of print, but when my wife heard that we found an octopus she scanned our dog-eared copy and sent it to me via email.

It was well received.  Kudos to my wife!

And so we had our last class meeting, followed by lunch.  At lunch we were talking about how the class is winding down, and they were saying how hard it is to believe that we are almost done.  Elysa said "I could live like this forever."  They all agreed that it was work, but fun work.

I have to say that I have not heard a discouraging word this whole trip from anyone.  Not about the accommodations, the food, the field trips, classes, time requirements, the weather, or anything. What a great bunch!

We wrapped up the day with a class meeting at 7:15pm.  We met to go over timing for the outing on the research vessel tomorrow morning, and to give class members info and a chance to sign up and fill out waiver forms for the canoeing trip on Friday.

I knew things were winding down when I needed to send a sheet around to get everyone's departure dates and times.  But, like I mentioned before, we are not done...here's what the rest of the trip looks like.

Thursday 5/30 - We are scheduled to go out on the lab's research vessel to do some bottom sampling and collect some plankton.  That afternoon each research team will also give a 10-15 min oral presentation of their work to the rest of the group, and they also submit their lab/research notebooks for final evaluation.

Friday 5/31 - We are scheduled to go to the South Slough National Estuary Research Reserve where an educational specialist there will lead our group on an interpretive canoe outing on the slough.  Then Friday night at 7pm, a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for work on Climate Change will be at OIMB talking about ocean acidification.  That should be extremely interesting.

So, the rest of today is taken up by students working on their lab notebooks, doing statistics and putting final touches on their oral reports.  I can't wait to see what they discovered.