By Katrina Munsterman Earlier this month, I led a 4-day field course for Bahamian high school students to learn how to ask scientific questions, design an experiment, collect field data, and analyze and present their findings. The course was held at Friends of the Environment Research Center in Marsh Harbour, Abaco in The Bahamas. Each…
Tag: Katrina Munsterman
Weathering the storm
By Katrina Munsterman I am thrilled to finally get started on a social-ecological study aimed to documentways in which people involved in fisheries in The Bahamas respond to multiple shocks,namely a category 5 hurricane and the Covid-19 pandemic. Hurricane Dorian, one of the strongest hurricanes on record in the Atlantic, hit TheBahamas on September 1,…
A seagrass field of dreams
by Katrina Munsterman, Ph.D. student in the Coastal Ecology and Conservation Lab in EEB If you build it, they will come. It all seems so simple. A few years ago, I gifted my dad a wooden bird house, a bag of bird seed, and The Sibley Guide to Birds. Within a few days of placing…
The future is science communication
by Katrina Munsterman, Ph.D. student in the Coastal Ecology and Conservation Lab in EEB I always wanted to be an actress, faking illness in dramatic attempts to trade the classroom decorated with construction paper flowers for a day spent counting banana slugs on the mossy floor of a redwood forest. I grew up with a…
Taking time: an ecologist’s reflection on studying a new system
by Katrina Munsterman, Ph.D. student in the Coastal Ecology and Conservation Lab in EEB Stay neutral. Steady breathing. Focused vision. Check your gauges. Swim straight. Lay the transect tape. Check for eels. Identify and count every.single.fish. Stay neutral. Learning how to scientific dive was no simple feat, but I knew that it was necessary to…
Changing impacts of herbivorous fishes through time
From reefbites, with permission by Matthew Tietbohl Animals are well-known to be important ecosystem engineers, impacting their habitats in a number of different ways. Some predators may create landscapes of fear where herbivores avoid, resulting in mosaics of different plant communities across a habitat. Other terrestrial herbivores, like elephants can impact their environments by destroying trees and…