Monday 7/29/2024
When I arrived at the museum, I went straight to the 4th floor, where some of the offices are located. There, I met with Shannon, who would be my supervisor of the week. She is in charge of the Conservation Department, known as MUVE, here at the Frost Museum. She explained that they are currently focusing on two main areas: research and outdoor conservation. In the research area they have the WetLab, a research facility where they experiment and keep a gene bank for corals and the outdoor conservation team, who has more activities, such as, surveying, planting native species and beach clean ups.
Today, I worked in the WetLab with Caileen. She gave me a guide with all the research that they do in various organisms, like the corals and jellies. She told me that with this guide I could answer the questions of any of the visitors. After reading the guide she gave a tour of the lab, showing me the tanks with different corals, and she even explained one of the experiments that a UM student is going to do with them. Another activity that I was assigned was to keep a record of how many visitors visit the lab, I needed to write down the number of visitors, keep track of how much time they spent in there and if they ask any questions.
Tuesday 7/30/2024
Today instead of driving to the Frost Museum, I went to Virginia Key. There, I met with Cameron and Juliana, who manage MUVE’s outdoor activities. After meeting them, we waited for some volunteers and began planting native plants. The purpose of this activity is to bring awareness about the role of native plants in our ecosystems. For example, one of the plants that we planted that day was the Fakahatchee grass, which is native to Florida and secures the substrate underneath it, thus avoiding erosion.
Wednesday 7/31/2024
Like yesterday, I did not t drive to the Frost Museum but went to Haulover Park, that is a beach. There, I used an app called iNaturalist, which is a data base containing different animals and plants.
It also allows users to use their location and if you don't know the name of the organism the users in the app are always willing to identify it for you. We spent approximately two hours taking pictures in the dune. After that I walked around the beach and ate breakfast with my mom.
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| Sea oats |
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| Saw Palmetto |
Thursday 8/1/2024
Today I worked in the WetLab. When I arrived, I help Muxin, who is the UM students that I mentioned during the Monday report. Her experiment consists of finding which food is better for the corals. In order to determine this, she needed to measure the mass of the corals before starting the experiment. She handled the corals while I wrote down the weight. After two hours we measured all of the 80 corals.
After lunch Cameron asked for my help on the 4th floor. He told me that we were going to set up a table to promote MUVE. We tried to gain the attention of the visitors by explaining what MUVE does and the benefits of joining the program.
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| Muxin's corals |
Friday 8/2/2023
On the final day of my internship, I worked with the WetLab one last time. I started by working on iNaturalist, transferring data from the plants we took photo of on Wednesday to an Excel document. This document is updated every month to have a record of the number of native plants and invasive ones in the zone. After transferring all the data, I started identifying some of the plants. At the beginning it was hard because all of them looked the same, but after doing the Excel document it made it a little bit easier to identify them.
To finish my day, I helped Shannon and Juliana plant some grasses in pots for their next MUVE action day.
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Reflection
Working at the Frost Museum was incredible experience. I got the opportunity to work in different areas each week and got exposed to things that I do not see daily, like the process behind creating an exhibit or the daily work of the husbandry team.
Every day after arriving from home, I would be very exhausted, but I would remind myself of how lucky I am for having this experience--not only for working at an awesome museum like the Frost but also for working in something that I am interested in, which is the environment and animals. Thank you to the Education Department, Exhibits/ Collections team, Husbandry Department, and Conservation Team for allowing me to be part of your routines for a week. And a special thank you to the Young Ambassadors Program for creating this opportunity for me and my fellow yappers!
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