End of Year Two

Happy Anniversary everyone!

Two years of adventures, uncertainty, insanity and being very, very wet. Thanks for coming along for the ride and for at least pretending I'm interesting.

No one knows what the future holds, especially one who has tied her future to the ocean, but whatever does come will be exactly what it should be.

And hopefully what it should be is filled with whales.

Are you ready for Year Three?

Speak Loud!

Museum in Review: Canadian Museum of Nature

Hey Team!

So when I'm not being a marine biologist, I wear many, many different hats. Including a guide at the Manitoba Museum in the youth programs. All just a long way of saying I know my museums and what makes them good, and what makes them bad.

And let me tell you, the Canadian Museum of Nature is good.

I know that as a national museum, they probably get a lot of funding. Which lets them maintain the museum and keep all the amazing species and specimens that are contained inside that building. But what impressed me the most was the educational supplementary material all around the museum.

First, the diversity of the museum: a dinosaur hall, following through into prehistoric mammals and then their modern counterparts. Lots of skeletons, lots of models and lots of information! Both for adults and kids, this museum is really here to teach the public about the natural world around them!

dinosaur skeletons

Dinosaur models

Polar bear model

My favourite hall, of course, was the ocean hall. I don't think I could have imagined a museum design better for teaching people about the oceans. It helps them though that they have a baby blue whale skeleton as their centrepiece.

Baby blue whale skeleton

And while we're at it, let's show people a world they've never imagined. Thermal vents on the ocean floor: a true alien world!

Diorama of a thermal vent

 And of course, it wouldn't be a Canadian museum if we didn't mention the Arctic... with an entire kids-friendly interpretive area where they get to "be researchers in the Arctic "in a "real research vessel". I didn't grow up with any of this, I'm terrified to think what would have happened if I did.

Model of a beluga in the Arctic research kids centre

 And finally, a game to teach kids about water conservation. Thank you Canada!

A dice and piece game teaching kids all about water conservation

Add a geology hall and lots of pretty gemstones to the end, and you have an outstanding museum that I think really hit it out of the park. Not to mention the beautiful building it's all housed in, and the very friendly staff that work there.

If you are in Ottawa and it's a gross day outside, take the opportunity to go through the Canadian Museum of Nature. I can guarantee you'll learn something!

Speak Loud!

their website: http://nature.ca/en/home

At the end

Hey Team,

So here I am, my second last day of my internship in Croatia. Unfortunately it wasn't the most exciting internship. On the water, our main job was to watch for dolphins, monitor dolphins during a sighting, and to take the waypoints every five minutes during the sighting. It was very similar to what I did in Florida here. In the office, it was a lot of little jobs here and there, some photo-ID, data entry, even trips to the post office and on one very long day, a lot of yard work and cleaning up an old military base where they are hoping to open a new centre (I was 95% sure I would find a dead body).

That being said, it was a lot of fun being in a totally new country where everything is different. This was the smallest village I've ever lived in, and it was a struggle, it being a tourist town it didn't really "open" until 3 weeks before I left. Just now, restaurants, bars and activity centres are opening... too little too late for me.

But it's given me a chance to watch a lot of TV and movies, pretend to learn more French (I do actually think I'm learning something) and I guess just RELAX! which is something I haven't done for this long in... forever. I usually get maybe a week or two without being too busy and too many commitments, but 3 months? I have never had that much down time, even with work every day.

I should have blogged more, I know, but without internet at the house, my only web time is at work, when I should be working... but there's enough time between assignments to do some blogging.

Anyways, now you know a little bit more of what I was doing here in Croatia at the Blue World Institute. Now I get to travel around in May, visiting with some friends and family in East North America. I have no idea what the plans are for the summer, until August when I head off to Mingan Island for (hopefully) my last internship. Once I'm home in June, hopefully I will have more time to update this thing.

Speak Loud!

Facts in a Bottle

Hey Team!

So keeping with a feature of this blog, here are 15 facts on most people's favourite cetacean, the bottlenose dolphin!

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1. Their scientific name is Tursiops truncatus, named for the shape of their teeth
2. They are one of the most well known cetacean species, due to their exposure in aquaria and in film
3. They live in groups called pods, with a "fission/fusion" social system.
4. The "fission/fusion" system describes one where there is a well defined population, but not all individuals will be see together at all times.
5. Small, more permanent groups can arise, like mom/calf pairs and male pairs.
6. Male pairs are affectionately called "bromances". Two or three adult males will be seen swimming and and acting together in call aspects of life. They can last for a few months up to a lifetime.
7. They have some strange... |mating rituals". A male pair (or trio) will approach a female, separate her from the group, mate with her (both of them), then return her to the group. This sometimes reminds us of inappropriate human behaviour, and we have nicknamed it such.
8. All cetaceans can be identified by individuals in a particular manner. Bottlenose dolphins, like other dolphins, can be identified easily by their dorsal fins.
9. Bottlenose dolphins can be somewhat violent towards each other in play, mating and aggressiveness. Therefore they can get a lots of scratches and scars.
10. These scars, scratches, nicks and notches are usually permanent, and on the dorsal fin can be used to identify dolphins as individuals.
11. Just like a human's fingerprint, no two dolphin fins are the same in size, shape and natural markings!
12. Like other small cetaceans (mostly toothed whales), bottlenose dolphins use echolocation to get around underwater.
13.  Echolocation deals with sound waves, so dolphins are able to "hear" the world around them, or even cooler... "see in sound". That's kind of cool.
14. Although their common name isn't "the common dolphin" (which does exist), they are the most well known dolphin, courtesy of movies and films like Flipper and Dolphin Tale.
15. not only are bottlenose dolphins intelligent enough to do flips and tricks on command, they are also intelligent enough to use tools for foraging! There are a lot of documented cases of dolphins using sea sponges to root around the ocean floor for food.

Enjoy your day!

There you go, a couple more facts for your cetacean knowledge!

Speak Loud!

Book in Review: The Story of B

An American priest crosses the ocean on the trail of a man known as “B”, with a singular mission: to hear the message that B is carrying and to see if he is what the Lutheran church has always feared – the Antichrist.

What JF discovers is that B’s message might be far greater than anything the church could have ever thought – the message on how to save the world.

From Amazon

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I should write the backs of books. Seriously. That took me like, 5 minutes and it’s been almost 3 months since I read the book.

The Story of B is a sort-of sequel to Ishmael – a sequel in that it is set more recently than Ishmael, and they mention Ishmael in the story. But other than that, it is essentially a book onto itself, though the backbone is the same: To save the world from its utter destruction, we must change the way we see humans in nature.

But, where Ishmael took more of a straight historical view, mixing in religion and biology where suitable, Story of B sort of does the opposite: It takes the religious and biological views, and mixes in history just to keep things clean.

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Personally, I liked and disliked this approach. I definitely liked Ishmael more, but then I still need to read Story of B at least two more times before I will pretend I actually understand it past the “big picture”. But, as someone who lives both in the scientific and religious world, it’s hard for me to sympathize with media that puts the two at odds – although I know that there is a history of it and in fanatical and extreme cases there still is.

Maybe it’s the moderate in me, but I always find it difficult when people blame religion for anything – even if it’s not my religion.

But what I did like about this book was all the biology in it! Ishmael had it, of course. You can’t talk about nature without talking about biology, it’s one of the other. But it was a lot more pronounced in Story of B, using terms and concepts straight out of my second year ecology class to explain how messed up we are in this world.

Now, I read a PDF version off of my laptop, as I am travelling and books are difficult to carry around (although how come every time I travel, determined not to bring books with me, I always come home with at least two?), and the way the PDF was set up was they put all the “lecture material” (AKA the nitty gritty details) at the very end, so you could get the overall premise and all the action from the book, then if your brain wasn’t complete mush, you could try to get through about 100 pages (actual pages, because it was a PDF) of all the details that make his argument valid.

I was so overwhelmed by the end of the actually book that I got through about half of the lecture material. I was also travelling, which made it difficult to find time to read on my laptop. So I sort of wish they had split it up in the book. But maybe they do in the print version. I don’t know. If someone does know, leave a comment!

So, in summary, Story of B is a great book that really makes you think, but I personally preferred Ishmael. All my atheist readers (you know who you are, even if I don’t), maybe you’ll like it more than I did, but I think anyone who reads it will get something awesome out of it.

I think I’ll end with a quote from the book, because it’s sort of the central principle, and it makes total and complete sense – and if it doesn’t, it means you need to read the book.

“If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds, people with a new vision. It will not be saved by people with old minds and new programs.”

Speak Loud!

Buy the book at Amazon

And at Chapters

Asking for Help

Hey Team!

So, the blog has gotten a facelift! I think I like the look a little more... still fun, but maybe a bit more professional? I have a friend with an amazing blog who is getting some pretty serious recognition for it, and it's not jealousy that I feel, but maybe simply motivation?

As I post my blog to my personal facebook, I know that my friends and family make up a fair amount of the people who read my blog. And that's awesome, thank you guys for supporting this crazy dream of mine (both the biology one and the blog one)!

But I am hoping to reach a wider audience, because let's face it, most of my friends do not want to grow up to be biologists, and the point of this blog is to inspire and teach.

So if anyone has any ideas on how to get this blog out there and read by people who don't actually know me, please leave a comment below, and hopefully I can start to see more views.

Or maybe there just aren't enough blog reading biologists in the world and it's a futile attempt. It's still fun to write so I won't be stopping any time soon.

And just to keep you intrigued, here are some of the upcoming posts...

• a review of a TV show
• a review of a movie
• conservation vs. research
• bottlenose dolphin facts

So stay tuned for more blog posts, once I find the time and the internet connection...

Speak Loud!

Mentoring With the Best of Them

Hey Team, sorry for the lack of catchy title, the song in my head was just too long.

So I am sitting pretty in Croatia, doing a lot of data work. photo-ID matching, data entry, cropping photos, renaming files, organizing files, etc. Lots of busy work while we wait for the weather to clear up so we can get on the waters again.

But I am here to talk about teaching and mentoring. Because all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I have become a mentor.

Woah.

I mean, that was the point of this blog at the beginning, you know? To give hints and tips about marine biology to try and help others who are just starting down this path. I think it's become something a little different, but I think it's still possible to learn something from all my babbling.

Anyways. Mentors. I have had quite a few in my life. Sticking with those in my career path, most of them have been grad students, older than me, already partway through their own research who for reasons beyond my comprehension took a special interest in my quest to become a marine biologist and let me help them with their lab work, taught me how to look for grants, how to write applications and let me use their names when trying to find work.

And they helped. I came to them with questions, hopes, dreams and they actually cared. I know, I'm surprised as well. They were my friends and my teachers. Mentors.

Higher up the ladder, my supervisor for my honours thesis has also been a mentor for almost 3 years now. She's taught me how to write science articles, how to think critically about statistics and how to perform real behavioural experiments. Also my boss at DFO, probably for some strange reasons of his own, is always willing to hire me back when I am in Winnipeg, and has offered up a variety of projects if I ever have a long stretch of time with him.

These are people that if there was ever an 'Oscars' for my life, would be thanked in my awards speech. It's true that without them I would have probably failed. Miserably.

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I have been a swimming instructor for 7 years. Five consecutively, then on and off for 2 years while I have been travelling. I have always, always, loved teaching, though usually I keep it to people under the age of 12.

One of the other interns here in Croatia is in her 2nd year of university in Germany, and she is just starting to do lab work and internships in marine biology. She has a lot of questions about different internships around the world, and how to do things like photo-ID and data entry.

It's not like I have a decade of experience under my belt, but I have enough that I can answer her questions, and now I have become one of those people who taught me so much. She asks me questions, tells me her plans for the future, and I answer her and encourage her.

The strangest part is that we are the same age. In Germany they start university a year late and she took a gap year, so although we are the same age, there is a big enough gap in our life paths that I can be a mentor to her.

It's weird though; I know that I take everything my own mentor's say so seriously, and now there's the chance that there is someone in the world doing the same with me.

It's a strange feeling, but a good one. I hope there will be lots and lots people I can help and teach in the future, because there are few things in life I love more.

There is also someone back home a friend got me in contact with that might also be asking advice about how to get into the field. I'm really hoping to lend her a hand, even if the competitor monster in me is roaring for me to stop. I so should have become a doctor.

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Anyways, that was just a little thing about mentors. Not much to take from it, other than if you have the opportunity to become a mentor to someone, take it. You need patience, but it feels so rewarding when you know that you are making a difference in someone's life. And they are old enough to appreciate it.

Speak Loud!