Final Prep/Pack Day for DCP’s June 2024 Field Courses!

Our bags are packed and we’re ready to go! (Although, we won’t break out in song! 😉) Manon arrived to Florida late on Tuesday. John double checked the drones with a test flight on Wednesday. We met with the first group, CSU, of students on Wednesday virtually. And we are now checked in for our flights tomorrow (Saturday) to Roatan! We have two weeks at Anthony’s Key Resort (AKR) and the Roatan Institute for Marine Sciences (RIMS) with two student groups: Colorado State University (CSU) from 1-8 June and St. Mary’s University (StMU) from 8-15 June. The students will help collect data on the dolphins and experience field work first-hand. While some students and Manon record surface observations, Kathleen will be collecting underwater video with two new GoPro’s mounted to the top – one looking forward and one looking back (stay tuned for photos to help you visualize). Thank you to DiverMojo Foundation for sponsoring the new GoPros to keep DCP’s field gear current and up-to-date! The rest of the students will be collecting space use data on how the dolphins use the main lagoon. In addition to student space-use data collection, John joins us for the CSU week to fly a drone above the main lagoon each morning. This is a new method; we hope the drone will take a full screen view during the morning 30-min data collection session while students do scan sampling and take panoramic photos. I.e., the drone should provide ground-truthing confirmation of the panoramic photos student take depicting dolphin placement at the surface. Thank you to the DCP Board for making this new method possible by covering the additional costs. As I said above, stay tuned for updates during the week for these new approaches to data collection … and for thoughts and daily impressions from the students!

Cheers

Kathleen, Manon, & John (for now … tomorrow we switch monikers to the CSU crew)

P.S. Baloo and Hazel, our seabeagle mascots, wish they were coming with us!