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Credit: Kenneth W. Able
Students participating in a Rutgers
Institute of Marine and Coasta Sciences
summer research program track striped
bass and fluke in the Great Bay south of
Tuckerton. Connecticut College senior
Anya Watson (standing, back to camera)
uses a hydrophone to find radio-tagged
fish; the tag sends information to a
laptop in the boat, where it's read by
Cook College senior Fernando Fuentes and
Rutgers graduate student Dana Rowles.
Katie Seebald (seated at the bow), a
senior from Mt. Holyoake College,
records the data. The Research
Internships in Ocean Sciences program
allows undergraduates from all over the
country to conduct their own research.
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By Ken Branson
This is where these kids get a clue,” said Kenneth W. Able, director of the Rutgers University Marine Field Station, as he watched four students in a Boston whaler on the Great Bay one day this summer.
The scientists-in-training were cruising the state’s southern shore looking for clues about the migration of striped bass. But Able, professor of marine biology, was referring to clues about the students’ futures. Is the life of a marine scientist the life for them?
The students participated in Research Internships in Ocean Sciences (RIOS), an eight-week program run by the Rutgers Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences (IMCS), that allows undergraduates from all over the country to conduct their own research. There were 15 interns this past summer, four from Cook College. One of the Cook students, sitting in the stern of the whaler that day, seemed to have already made up his mind.
“It’s going to be marine biology,” Fernando Fuentes said, speaking of his postgraduate plans. “I’m not sure beyond that. Marine science is so broad, it takes in so much, that it’s hard to know exactly what to study. But it’s definitely going to be marine biology.”
Fuentes, who comes from North Bergen in Hudson County, spent the summer tracking striped bass to determine whether they migrate, and if so, how and where. Fuentes had been investigating if the fish moved at night. But on that hot, muggy day in June, he was concentrating on an even narrower question: Was there a bass nearby, and which bass was it? He watched a digital readout on an instrument in the stern of the boat, while a classmate rotated a hydrophone under the water. Ultrasonic tags implanted in stripers sent signals to the hydrophone and Fuentes read the data to another student, who recorded it in a notebook. Dana Rowles, a Rutgers graduate student, supervised the work and piloted the boat. The students would crisscross the bay that day. This is scientific grunt work, and there is no way around it.
“I like to get results,” said Anazette Sloley, another intern from Rutgers. She spent most of her summer in a laboratory analyzing seawater. “But the work you have to do to get results, well, sometimes that’s another story.”
Sloley, a marine biology and animal science major from Hackensack, said she hoped to become a veterinarian, perhaps working with large marine mammals. After her lab work, she had planned to take a cruise off the mouth of the Mississippi River, studying the relationship between nitrogen and phosphates in the river’s plume. She couldn’t wait. “One thing I do know,” Sloley said. “I don’t want to spend my life cooped up in a laboratory. I need to be on the water.”
Amy Williams, a natural resources management major from Tabernacle, in Burlington County, was curious about what happened to marine invertebrates and insects living along the wrackline (the line of natural marine litter dropped on a beach by waves) when the beach is raked, and the wrack moves. So she designed a research approach for gathering data and plunged into it. A fifth-year senior who expects to get a teaching certificate, Williams is on the fence between teaching secondary school and research.
Erin Jackson, a marine science major from Agawam, Mass., explored the relationship between silicon and the red tide, a natural phenomenon during which oxygen-consuming algae bloom. Like Sloley, she spent most of her summer in the lab. “I’ve enjoyed it, and I learned a lot,” Jackson said. “But I’m not sure I want to do research. I’m taking a course in science journalism in the fall.”
For Fuentes and Williams, there have been moments when they knew they were headed in the right direction. Fuentes’ epiphany came when he was in a Boston whaler chasing stripers on a dark night and he heard something in the water nearby. “I heard what I thought was a dolphin sound,” he said. “Then, just a few yards from the boat, I saw the silhouettes of two dolphins, who came over to check me out.”
Williams realized her destiny after lumbering out of bed at 5:30 one morning to pick up beach litter before the plows arrived. She recalled being alone on the beach when sun came up and the curtain rose on the day. All doubt left her. “This was it,” Williams thought. She was in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing.
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