This guest post was written by Phil Matich, a graduate researcher in Dr. Mike Heithaus' lab at Florida International University.
After only a month, the shark has grown 2 cm and gained 1 kg in body mass; the scar from the surgery has completely healed, and one of the sutures had already dissolved, and the other marks from tissue collections were healing (see the picture of the fin clip).  On the second set, we caught three more sharks (74, 81, and 104 cm TL), and acoustically tagged the 81 cm TL shark to track its movements.  After only a few hours on the water he had caught five sharks and deployed two transmitters!  On the third set we caught another shark (104 cm TL), and had a surprise on the line - a 2 meter alligator, which is the first gator we’ve caught after >3000 longline hooks deployed in the estuary.  It was pretty skinny and very docile, so it was probably sick and in poor condition and just looking for an easy meal.  We cut the line and the hook that was stuck in its mouth will rust out in the next month or so - I wasn’t going to reach my hand in to try and get it out.  Overall, it was an awesome day!  And, we got to hang out with a dolphin for a little while on the ride back.  I’m looking forward to more days like this in the future.

I've always been fascinated with the names of places and the history behind those names. Why is Paris called Paris, and why did somebody in Texas feel the need to use the name again? Why is the big rock in the middle of Australia called Uluru by the native Aboriginals and why did a white guy rename it Ayers Rock in the 19th century? The coastal Everglades is full of fantastically obvious (Mud Lake) and wonderfully enigmatic (Willy Willy) place names and I have bumped into many of them during my research. Here is a list of some of those places and where the names come from (or at least where I think they come from):

1. Shark River: There are sharks in it, though they are not easy to find sometimes.

2. Coot Bay: For many years I had no idea how this bay got its name or what a coot even was, then one day while driving through it early in the morning I saw a flotilla of water birds (at least a couple hundred strong) sitting together on the bay. They turned out to be coots from the genus Fulica. Case closed.

Coots. Photo Credit

3. Whitewater Bay: The name of this bay is obvious to anyone who has ever been there because whenever anything stronger than a light wind picks up, the bay becomes a playground for small to medium-sized waves (called whitecaps). If you look off in the distance on a windy day the water looks like it is completely white, meaning you are in for a bumpy boat ride.

4. Tarpon Bay: There are tarpon in it.

5. Rookery Branch: A highly reticulated branch of the Shark River that used to contain large numbers of wading bird rookeries (breeding sites). Sadly, the bird populations in this area have been greatly diminished by over-hunting and habitat alterations.

Everglades rookery. Photo credit

6. Ponce de Leon Bay: Named for Juan Ponce de Leon, the 16th century Spanish conquistador and first European to set foot in Florida. He was killed in 1521 by the Calusa tribe when they shot him in the leg with an arrow coated with poison from the manchineel tree.

Juan Ponce de Leon. Photo credit

7. Aaron Cut and Derek Cut: These are the names my lab came up with for the Shark River after it forks into two rivers as you head northeast towards Tarpon Bay. On my first day in the Everglades in 2007 my former labmates Derek and Aaron were on the boat with me, and Derek was driving. As we approached the fork, Derek asked Aaron "Which fork should I take?" Aaron said "Well, they both pretty much go to the same place, but the one on the left is wider and straighter, while the one on the right is narrower and much curvier. I prefer the left fork." Derek promptly took the right fork.

8. Flamingo: This park ranger station used to be an outpost settlement that ferried supplies to the Keys. It also used to be a rest stop for migrating flamingos. Now it's just the mosquito capital of the United States.

9. Pa-Hay-Okee: Seminole name for the Everglades, meaning "grassy water."

10. Harney River: Named after Colonel William Harney, who led American soldiers into battle against the Seminoles during the 19th century.

11. Gunboat Island: Small island in the Shark River shaped sort of like a gunboat. A little bit of a stretch.

12. Lard Can: Apparently the name of this campsite is derived from the habit of early gladesmen (alligator hunters, moonshiners, bird hunters) storing food and water supplies in empty 5 gallon lard cans at this site. Now I want to know what water with a hint of lard tastes like. Probably like watery lard.

Lard Can campsite. Photo credit

If anybody thinks any of this information is wrong, please post corrections in the comments.

I'm just going to go ahead and say it: graduate school is great (though The Simpsons disagree). We're given 2-9 years (depending on whether you're a masters or doctoral student and the scope of your research) to live in a cozy academic bubble surrounded by like-minded peers doing research on things we think are interesting and important. We teach, we write, we think, we analyze, and we get to explore new places and meet really smart people. We don't have tons of extra responsibilities like kids (usually) and onerous administrative crap, and we're given some room to fail every once in a while (the most important part of the scientific process). Sure graduate school can be frustrating, annoying, and just plain idiotic at times, but that's pretty much a definition for life. Let's not get bogged down in the mundane. But the question I've been asking myself recently is, what's next?



What comes after graduate school? I'm planning on graduating with my PhD next summer and there are a whole lot of decisions that need to be made and time that needs to be managed efficiently. Here's a brief synopsis of my scientific to-do list for the next nine months: Finish writing my dissertation (5-6 chapters, likely somewhere north of 200 pages when all said and done), try to publish each of those chapters in scientific journals (two down, 3-4 to go), continue networking and building collaborations with other scientists to expand my future research opportunities, and apply for multiple post-doctoral research positions and hope that one comes through.

This last bit represents a very interesting part of the multi-faceted scientific life: we have to always be looking forward and backwards at the same time. For example, I am currently writing two brand spanking new research proposals for two different post-doctoral opportunities while at the same time writing papers based on my alligator research that is already complete. Half my time is spent looking back at the research I've done, trying to make sense of it and fitting it into the current scientific discourse, while the other half of my time is spent trying to get funding to do future research and predict what kinds of scientific questions are going to be important over the next few years. It's not like this is unique to me (all scientists do this) but as a young scientist it's still quite a challenging balancing act.

Also, I have to start thinking about what the "goal" of all this is (as if there is a concrete one out there somewhere). After my post-doc, do I want to try and get a job as a scientist with the state or federal government? What about an environmental NGO? Or a job applying science to public policy? Or a job at a university, and if so, what kind of university? Some of these options require different kinds of post-doc experience, so choosing the "right" post-doc can have big implications for your career path. I've attended lots of job panels at science conferences around the country where scientists from all the different job sectors come together and talk about what their jobs are like, how to get a job in their field, and on and on. The message from each panel has been clear: it is not always easy to switch from one type of scientific career to another once you've started down a certain path, so do the legwork now to set yourself up for the type of career you want. That is, if you know what type of scientific career you want.

Through this whole convoluted process I've found encouragement from some advice given to me by a man I met in Belize many years ago: I was 18 and working on a research project studying manatee ecology and behavior off the coast of Belize City. One day we went out to a coral reef to track manatees and do some spear fishing for our dinner, and while we were swimming around a huge catamaran pulled up near our little boat. I swam over to the boat to see who was on board and was warmly greeted by a wealthy middle-aged California businessman on vacation with his wife. They invited me on board for a little lunch and a Coke and we talked about science and the randomness of meeting people anywhere at anytime. During the conversation he said to me "You want to know the secret to success? To how I got where I am today? It's staying open to possibilities. Never close yourself off to new things and new people, and pursue new opportunities as they come your way. Take risks and see what happens. There are no wrong choices, just different ones." Good advice I think.

  

Guest post today from a new member of the FCE community!
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Jessica Sanchez
Doctoral Student
Florida International University
Department of Biological Sciences
jsanc318@fiu.edu

I've always had a passion for animals, particularly large animals of the dangerous variety (big predators), but before I started my PhD I had never really spent much time thinking about alligators. Now, after working with alligators in the coastal Everglades for the past 5 years, they are one of my favorite animals. Let me tell you a few reasons why:

1. Alligators can get really big. The largest alligator officially recorded in Florida from 1977-1993 weighed in at 1041 lbs. Alligators can get so big that they can take down adult deer, like in this picture taken in Georgia by Terri Jenkins, a US Fish and Wildlife Service district fire management officer. The gator in this picture is "only" 12-14 ft. long.

Alligator heart (Photo credit)

An alligator with a GPS transmitter attached to its neck (the white blob with the antenna sticking out).

One of the great joys of science, in my view, is teaching others about science, how it works, and why it is arguably the most advanced type of problem solving ever invented by humans. As graduate students at FIU we are given ample opportunities to pass along our knowledge, expertise, and love of science to the next generation of scientists (undergraduates) through teaching classes, giving public lectures, and directly mentoring individual students. At last count FIU had about 40,000 undergraduates enrolled, so finding motivated students to help out with graduate research is a relatively easy task.

Ever wonder what an alligator's breath smells like? One of the perks of my research is I get to hang out within sneezing distance of the amazing reptiles and I can tell you from first hand experience that their breath smells like death. Two of the major questions I try to answer with my research is what do alligators eat in the coastal Everglades and where do they eat it? To get at these questions, I use two different techniques: stomach contents analysis (SCA) and stable isotope analysis (SIA).



For SCA, me and my team catch alligators at night using high powered spotlights and steel snares attached to long poles. Once an alligator has been caught and its mouth taped shut, we bring it up on board our boat, strap it to a long wooden plank so it can't move, place a PVC pipe into its mouth to hold it open, and then thread a tube down its throat and into its stomach. The other end of the hose is attached to a water pump which we use to fill the gator's stomach with water, and then we use a modified Heimlich maneuver to force the water and anything floating in it out of the gator and into a bucket (check out a video of this process here). It may sound like a rough experience for the gator, but it's very similar to how humans get their stomachs pumped at a hospital. Also, in the old days alligator stomach contents could only be gathered by killing the animal and then cutting its stomach out of its body, so our technique is obviously much more preferable.





I've found that alligators eat a wide variety of different foods, including blue crabs, anhingas, rice rats, mink, anchovies, catfish, pond apples, and even non-food items like string and balloons. Alligators are very curious animals and will basically eat anything they can fit their mouths around.

Pieces of blue crab, anhinga, and shrimp pulled out of a gator's stomach.

SCA gives us information about what kinds of animals alligators ate over the past two or three days, but to get a sense of what they eat over longer time periods I use SIA, a technique that uses complex machines to determine the chemical components (like carbon and nitrogen) of animal tissues. Different animals and different food webs can exhibit different types of carbon and nitrogen, and we can use the relative abundances of these different types of elements in animal tissues to get an idea of where they've been feeding and when. By using SCA and SIA together I can get a better overall picture of how alligators fit into the coastal Everglades food web, and this information will be very useful to Everglades ecosystem managers as they figure out how best to restore the Everglades to what it once was.

To study American alligators that live in the coastal Everglades you need to be a bit of a night owl. Alligators are much easier to find and catch at night because their eyes glow bright red when you shine a spotlight at them, whereas during the day they blend in amazingly well with the water and the vegetation because of the sleek, low profile of their bodies. Fortunately for me, my natural sleep patterns involve staying up late and waking up around noon.



Even with the natural advantages of my sleep patterns, this type of research is easier to carry out if you camp out in the Everglades because you can quickly crash in your tent after a long night of alligator wrestling rather than making the long haul back to shore. Everglades National Park provides a surprisingly large number of great camp sites for researchers and fishermen to use. One type is called a "chickee," which is a very simple wooden platform that sits on stilts above the surface of the water.

Photo credit

The chickees are generally clean and comfy (as long as you bring an air mattress), and sleep is aided by the sounds of the water gently lapping at your platform and the night calls of the frogs and birds.

There are also campsites that have been cleared out of the middle of mangrove islands. Our lab's Everglades research team frequently stays at one called Cane Patch because it can accommodate a large number of tents and has lots of space to move around in.

The disadvantages of staying at a campsite rather than a chickee surrounded by water is that you open your supplies up to invasion by rats and you can get a scare from the occasional rattlesnake, but on the plus side you have space to build a small fire so you can dry your clothes after the skies open up and drop buckets of rain on you.

After doing alligator research in the coastal Everglades for 5 years, camping out at my study site is now one of my favorite things to do. The sunsets and sunrises are superb in the swamp, and the stars at night aren't washed out by the neon lights of Miami. When the moon is full and the sky is clear, it can feel as bright as daytime, and the alligators are just waiting for me to find them.