Journal entry 1

What is the background of the people in your peer group? (other volunteers?) What different strengths do they bring to the research project? What strengths do you bring?

All of the interns I am working with come from different countries: Scotland, England, Australia, and South Africa, and we will be getting one more intern mid September that comes from somewhere in the UK as well. The three girl interns all have their divemasters certification and were volunteers with Global Vision International (GVI) so not only are they very comfortable in the water but they also have experience doing coral surveys. They know a lot about underwater life. Two of the girls already have their undergraduate degrees somehow related to Marine Biology. The male intern has years of experience in air traffic control which is very useful when we communicate to our microlight during our whale shark encounters. I don't have a strong underwater background and I do not have my degree yet, so it's hard to know exactly what I contribute to the dynamic. But, I am very passionate about whale shark research and conservation and I have planned for months to be here in the Seychelles so I have had extra time to read up on whale sharks and ecotourism. I have a faculty advisor at UVU so I have resources I can pull from because I'm still in school.

Data collection is inherently "noisy" with many variables causing each data point to be imprecise. Now that you've been in the water.....list as many variables as you can think of that will make your data imprecise.

On the whale shark encounters a lot of the information has to be judged by humans such as our location from the shore, the visibility (unless we measure it with instruments), cloud cover, and even things like our actual beginning and ending time of the overall whale shark encounter. The biggest variable in our data would probably come from the I3S software that is used to identify each individual shark. Once we take pictures you pick three control points which are the top of the 5th gill slit, the edge of the pectoral fin, and the bottom of the 5th gill slit. Then you pick 12 spots in that control area. That data is run through the database and the software gives you the top 50 matches. Then the two people running the software have to visually match the found shark to the sharks in the database. There are many variables in this process including which spots you decide, where you mark the control points if the picture is murky, and which shark you match. They use the I3S data to learn about the Seychellois whale shark population so it is important those factors are reduced as much as possible. It's very useful and the best technology we have now, but since there is such a human element to matching the spots and stripes of each shark there is always a margin for error.