Manjula goes blogging...

As another hot and humid summer rolls into Florida, many will be busy on the nesting beaches but some of us here at UF’s zoology dept will be tippity-tapping the summer away at the computer. Of course conversation in the lab inevitably returns to “I’d much rather be on the beach” and from there to the summer we all spent together on Melbourne Beach.

‘Twas the summer of ’96. Several of us from the ACCSTR were at Melbourne Beach, collecting data for our respective Master’s theses- Sarah Bouchard was looking at sea turtles as nutrient transporters, Dan Wood was working on nest site selection cues, Kate Moran was studying effects of the thermal environment on hatchling emergence and I was finishing up a study comparing three loggerhead populations. However, we were all united by a common project - the “pilings project”. Having to carry 49 PVC pipes that stood 1 m high and were 25 cm in diameter, up and down the beach at dusk and at dawn was a very bonding experience!

It was also one of my most luxurious field seasons - we were able to rent a huge, three-bedroom house just a block from the beach, fully equipped with every possible comfort, plenty of movies to watch on television, and our own private beach access and dock on the river. Having the UCF sea turtle crew down the road made living at Melbourne all the more enjoyable - netting for turtles in the Indian River Lagoon with them and swimming alongside the net in the green, murky water, unsure if I would encounter a turtle, shark, or ray made me feel like a real turtler!! Alex Silveira from TAMAR spent a few weeks with us and brought us each good luck wrist bands from Brazil - the guy at our favorite shaved ice place wanted to know which cult we belonged to! ‘Twas also the summer when someone reported me as “a Mexican lady stealing eggs on the beach,” when I burnt toast and filled the house with smoke (for some odd reason no one seems to forget or forgive that incident!), and when a threatening hurricane forced mandatory evacuation of our beach house (not a drop of rain fell and not a cloud was seen).

We worked hard, we played hard, and now we remember it fondly.