Switching Gears

Switching Gears

Written by: Sam Trail. April 22, 2022

The FAU Marine Lab is usually bustling with sea turtle hatchlings from mid-May of each year through until the end of March in the following year, but how do our students keep busy when our tanks are empty?

With no food to make or poop to scoop, our researchers switch gears for a short period of time. We finally have a few months to take a deep dive into the data we have been collecting:

  • What did the temperature profiles look like for the nests that produced males?
  • How long did it take our pickiest eaters to reach 120 grams?
  • How does hatchlings’ sex relate to growth rates?

These are all questions that can be answered through data analysis. Instead of scraping fish, washing turtles, and cleaning tanks, our days are filled with spreadsheets. Boring, right? Wrong. When we are not caught up in the day-to-day duties of taking care of the turtles, we can take a step back and determine what the data we are collecting is telling us about our changing world.

We are always excited to have turtles in our lab, but the quiet days leading up to summer can be exciting days of discovery too!