The first half of today was really boring so that’s gonna be quick. I make no promises for the second.
So today was field visits. I went to the Occuquan Wildlife Refuge, so I got to wake up at 7:45 😁. We arrived there at 10ish and started right off with water testing, then went into biodiversity counts. We saw a lot of damselflies and dragonflies (hence the name of today’s blog). We did a similar thing with benthic macroinvertebrates, which are small critters just large enough to see that live in the soil at the base of lakes and rivers. We found a damselfly and dragonfly nymph. We then had lunch with a super cool refuge manager, and a three-hour boat ride on the Potomac.
When we got back we went straight into our CCAMLR simulation. The Ross Sea is a large sea in the Antarctic, and every year a group of countries, the CCAMLR, tries to make it a marine protected area, and every year it fails. We were simulating a meeting in our groups. Each person or a pair of people was assigned a country to represent. I was Russia. We were also given an information sheet with some pretty specific instructions. Russia, for example, was to sit quietly for 5 minutes then storm out of the meeting. My partner and I nailed it. We were super shady, and when we left, WE LEFT. It was the most fun I’ve had in a long time.
Well, until tomorrow. 🙂
Environment DC 