Post by Riley Farbstein (Colgate '24)

Before embarking on our trip to the Gulf of Mexico, I found myself a bit nervous. I worried about being on a boat for up to 12 hours a day with a group that I barely knew. Little did I know this experience would be one of the best choices I have made during my undergraduate career. I loved being on the boat all day; the work was engaging and fascinating. Although getting up at 5:45 AM to depart the dock at 7:00 AM was definitely a struggle for me, I was eager to get out of bed and explore what each day had to offer. The early mornings also became easier as the trip went on. I looked forward to the early morning boat rides to our sites in Louisiana. Every morning, my lab partners and I sat at the front of the boat and enjoyed the company of dolphins. The dolphins always seemed to strangely appreciate our presence in the channel and, almost every day, were found riding the vessel's wake. 

Likewise in Alabama, on the EO Wilson, Grant from the Dauphin Island Sea Lab explained the different scuba certification licenses, such as scientific, commercial, and leisure, as well as the process that he went through to obtain his license. Moreover, Grant used little anecdotes to describe how to tie different knots commonly used on boats. Cory, a diver in training at the Sea Lab, explained his upbringing, his decision to change his career and pursue marine sciences, and his knowledge of photography. At a dinner party hosted by Grant, Kelly, another scientist at the lab, used stories to describe the usefulness of art in paleontology and to provide advice about graduate school. ​

Post by Mary Thomas Powell (Colgate ’26)
 
Before embarking on our fieldwork , I was not sure what to expect. I knew we were going to have long, hot days, but I did not anticipate the excitement of seeing so many organisms I had never seen before. While sieving and picking through samples of seafloor sediment, I came across crabs, fish, worms, starfish, shrimp, clams, snails, a shark tooth, and other small marine animals. During the rides out to the sites, I saw dolphins, sea gulls, pelicans, sea turtles, jumping fish, and crabs even larger than those we pulled up with the box core. To my untrained eye, what looked like a bucket of mud quickly turned into a treasure chest of organisms. 
 
Despite spending time on the ocean before this trip, I continued to see new organisms many of the days we were offshore. I also found the diversity among the different types of crabs and clams exciting. Although most of the clams were smaller than my finger nail (some closer to the size of the tip of a bobby pin), we did find a larger clam in Louisiana that was slightly smaller than a tennis ball. Some clams were pink, while others were white. Some had little tentacle-like protrusions when they opened up in the water, while others remained closed. Similarly, some of the crabs had polka dots, while others looked like moles. After much experimentation, I discovered that all the crabs we pulled up pinch. 
 
Although the days were long and hot, they were not as bad as I thought they would be. The length of the days and heat of the sun were eased by the excitement of seeing organisms that I did not know existed. At the end of each day I was the dirtiest and most exhausted that I have been in a while, yet I could not wait to wake up and do it all over again the next day. 
 
The excitement of discovery spans beyond the field back into the lab. Prior to this summer I found the idea of lab or computer work boring and tedious. However, after participating in the process of discovery in the field, I am looking forward to further discoveries in the lab and being able to ask and answer questions with our samples. The anticipation of what we will find in our samples mirrors the suspense of pulling up a new box core. 
 
Although the field portion of our summer has come to a close, I am excited to embark on our lab time. As Paul likes to say, “Studes, we are seeing stuff we ain’t never seen before.”

Post by Ryan D’Errico (Colgate ’25)
 
While the focus of our fieldwork was collecting marine bivalves, I was pleasantly surprised to see numerous other types of marine animals! When the crew brought up the very first box core on the RV Acadiana in Louisiana, a crab crawled out of the mud and started walking on the deck. At that moment, I assumed it would be a rather rare occurrence to see crabs and other sea life during our time in the gulf, but throughout our weeks in the field, I came to see much more than the clams that we were there to study. Minutes after all of the box core samples were on the boat, Paul demonstrated how to sieve the clay-rich sediment. He quickly pulled something out of the mud which he told us was a polychaete worm. I hadn’t even considered that I would see worms on this trip, but they were one of the most common types of animal besides bivalves that we found in our samples. I will admit that I was a bit squeamish about touching the worms to throw them overboard when it was my first time picking through the samples, but this soon became second nature. 
 
Sieving and picking through seemingly endless samples on a constantly rocking boat was truly exhausting in a way that I had never previously experienced (even despite the fact that my watch repeatedly reminded me that my daily steps were at a record low). During moments when I was most drained, looking at different types of wildlife was the perfect break that gave me the energy to continue to work. One of the best examples of this was on one of our last days in Louisiana when I was feeling a bit nauseous and took a moment to stare at the horizon. I soon spotted a sea turtle swimming in the waves, not believing my eyes until others confirmed my observation. 
 
Other times while picking through samples we found shrimp, which we placed in plastic containers filled with water, watching them swiftly swim around before releasing them into the ocean. Another type of organism that I found to be particularly cute was the olive snails that we came across in Alabama. When these snails appeared in the samples, they appeared dead, hiding in their shells. However, after placing them in water, the little olive snails would emerge and zoom around the containers at a speed much faster than I ever imagined a snail could. In my opinion, the craziest animal we found was part of an eel, which still wriggled despite being detached from the rest of its body. Holding it in my hands was both cool and creepy as it slithered in my palms. 
 
During our 3+ hour-long journeys back from the sampling sites in Louisiana, we knew we were nearing land when seagulls and pelicans began to follow the boat, hoping we had fish to feed them.  Like clockwork, a few minutes after our first bird sightings we would regain cell service. Every day as we entered Terrebonne Bay, we experienced a grand finale of dolphins that would swim in front of the bow of the boat, mere feet away from us. It was breathtaking to see them, often 4 or 5 at a time racing underneath us and breaching for air. Sometimes I even waved at the dolphins and wondered if they could see me.
 
 Now that I am back at Colgate reflecting on my last 3 weeks it is hard to believe this experience really happened, considering how different it was from anything else I have ever done. I don’t know if I will ever participate in similar fieldwork again, so I am trying to record and hold onto the memories that I made while on the Wilson and Acadiana.

Members of the Paleo Lab attended the Conservation Paleobiology symposium earlier this week at University of Florida. Jane, Charlie, Juan, and Victor presented posters and Luke and Paul gave oral presentations. We learned about some fascinating research projects, including quite a number that highlighted the importance of partnerships between resource managers, conservation paleobiologists, and front-line communities. In addition, there were fieldtrips (both formal and informal), a chance to see the FL Museum of Natural History and UF's bat colony, and much more. Thanks to the organizers and the many students who attended!

Post by Jane Carskaddan (Colgate '24).

While Paul and the Gulf team were digging through sediment on their boats, I was back at Colgate hard at work on a different project. Together with biophysics professor Rebecca Metzler, I’ve been looking at the microstructure of shells from Paul’s archives to see if anthropogenic influences have changed the way bivalves grow their shells. My days in the lab aren’t as eventful as the rest of the group’s days in the field, but I still got to do a bit of traveling for my project this summer. I got the opportunity to go to Berkeley, California to gather data on my samples using an X-ray Photoemission Electron Microscope (XPEEM) at Berkeley Labs. An XPEEM is a very powerful microscope powered by a synchrotron, which is a type of particle accelerator. It's used for all sorts of things, but for my project we wanted to look at the different orientations of the crystals that make up my shells. So, Rebecca’s lab set out to California with a freezer of shellfish samples. I spent our free day exploring beautiful San Francisco with two of my labmates, Sarah and Gabe, where we saw sea lions, ate dim sum, and touched the freezing Pacific Ocean (much less welcoming than the Gulf). The next morning at 7 am was the official start of Rebecca’s time on the XPEEM. She had 48 straight hours and we had to make every second count. To tackle those hours, we split into pairs: Sarah and Edlin for the day shifts, me and Gabe for the nights. Rebecca would be up for the entire 48, a fact that made me think twice before complaining too much about my own exhaustion. So, Gabe and I reported to the synchrotron just as the sun was starting to set at 7 pm. You walk into the big pink building and are immediately confronted by huge machines with wires sprawling every which way. It's a little intimidating, but the fact that a lot of the equipment is covered in tin foil (to keep heat in) somewhat took away from that effect. The XPEEM itself doesn’t look like a microscope at all. If you look at the picture of me in front of it, everything behind me is the microscope. The sample sits inside one of the portholes. There’s also a giant wall of controls that was double my height. I only ever saw Rebecca adjust a few of them, so maybe they’re just there for show. Working on the XPEEM is largely uneventful and very slow - you run scans that take ten minutes and run the data through an image generating program that takes twenty. It takes hours to collect enough data for a whole shell. Edlin and Sarah spent their day on one of their samples of barnacles that they hoped would only take their shift to finish. We ended up working on that same sample for most of the night. I won’t lie, seeing how long those barnacles were taking was really frustrating to me. By the middle of the night I was so tired and just wanted to see the images of my shells. We finally got my first shells loaded somewhere around 5 am and produced a few images by the time my shift was over at 7 am. I was so excited after waiting all night that I almost wanted to stay longer and keep working, but my need for sleep outweighed that desire (by the time I got to bed I had been awake for almost 24 hours). The second night was more of the same, except this time I was well rested from sleeping all day and actually got to work on my shells for most of the night. We left California the next day after seeing the Golden Gate Bridge and took a few days to reset our sleep schedules. It was an exhausting experience, but for me it was worth it. I love microscopy and this type of data collection. I found myself feeling very comfortable surrounded by gigantic instruments at a particle accelerator in the dead of night. I legitimately hope that I will be able to return one day in some capacity, even if it means consuming a worrying amount of caffeine again.

Post by Charlie Filipovich (Colgate '23).

​Sitting on the deck of the R/V Apalachee, taking in the slightly salty breeze and enjoying the complimentary turbulence, there were two things on my mind: 1) thanking the creators of motion sickness medicine and aggressively spicy snacks, and 2) pondering options of how I can continue to do this after Colgate. As a rising senior, I can see the maroon light at the end of the tunnel, with the looming question of “what’s next?” pushing me ever closer to it.

I like to think of my academic journey thus far as its own experiment: much like this summer’s fieldwork, flexibility is required and you never know for certain what you’re going to discover. I knew I wanted to pursue a career in academia after Colgate, perhaps in the form of a PhD or Master’s program, but I wasn’t totally sure if paleobiology was the right field for me or if grad school was something I was truly interested in. With only classroom experience, I needed more data to test my hypothesis. This summer was the perfect opportunity to do so. ​

Post by Luke Calderaro (Colgate '22).

​Work days in Louisiana and Alabama were tough. Our days at sea were long, the Sun was a bright yet haunting constant, and our two boats sometimes felt extremely crowded. At the end of the first leg of our experience, I was looking forward to a bit of time on land. Not long after arriving in Hamilton, though, an unexpected eagerness to get back on the water overcame me. Given our time in Cocodrie and on Dauphin Island, I thought I was fully prepared for our time in Florida. Little did I know that the Sunshine State had a lot in store for us.

Post by Juan José Gómez (Colgate '24).

While in the Gulf this summer, the heat and humidity were not the only things by our side as we did fieldwork. Our lab group was fortunate enough to meet researchers in adjacent fields, as they joined us on some of our offshore days. Meeting local people, as well as taking time to explore the areas of Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana where we were based, exposed us to various cultures of the South (some aspects which were more discreet than others). We were also able to insert ourselves into the extremely fun world of marine research at the Florida State University Coastal and Marine Lab (FSUCML), Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON), and the Dauphin Island Sea Lab (DISL). With every boat ride, came friendly faces which became voices of guidance as we talked about careers. Our conversations with people ranged from graduate students to tenured professors. Even while working in the blistering heat, we talked about preparation for graduate school applications and our futures beyond our academic careers. Most of these informal encounters happened on the boat as the seas rocked us back and forth, during dinner on outdoor swings, and in spaces at the marine labs. Some employees of the marine labs shared their journeys that brought them to where they are currently. These stories were made much more real by disclosing the mistakes that we can expect along the way. I enjoyed the conversations that we had and found them to be very influential in thinking about what I might do following my experience learning about marine invertebrates. There was never a dull moment when participating in fieldwork; most times I thought about how the work seemed more fun than I expected.