This blog: purpose and objectives

This blog was maintained during my cooperation with Dr. S. Gruber (BBFS) during the Lemon Shark project in 2007.

It was created in order to provide news in an almost up to date manner, to keep informed those who backed me up on this endeavour and to all who gladly cooperated in several ways to make this quest for answers possible.

You will find a lot of spelling errors on this blog, duplicate images, and so on.

Bear in mind that almost all posts here where written after long hours of work (sometimes 14, 16h) resulting several times on falling asleep over the keyboard while adding a few lines more.

Therefore it will remain as is, with no corrections or changes since it´s basically a set of memories that were gathered here.

Scientific explanations and content will probably be available on the web in a near future but not on this particular blog itself.

Aknowledgments

I would like to thank all who made this experience possible and also, to all of those who kept in touch sending words of incentive and who patiently visited this blog (with all it´s spelling errors, duplicate images, and so on.)

Now it´s time for data analysis

Back in Portugal it´s time to go through all the data collected.

From field work, Telemetry and genetics.

Our Sharks: Why did they aggregate? Where did they came from? Where do they go after they aggregate? Are there any sibling relationships between the Sharks found in Florida waters when compared with others collected in other geographically spread out areas? These are some of the question marks that need to be solved.

A Work in progress.

Lab Work

After a few months doing field work, it was time to get back into a lab.

A great thanks to Kevin and Joey for their knowledge sharing and good working environment.

And Cheers to all the staff at the FM, specially to those who shared the same facilities and help out in several ways!

Broken down Laptop..

Needless to say that having your computer breaking down if foreing lands, is something that can really nag you a lot.. reason why this blog hasn´t been updated for a while.
But it wasn´t just the hard-drive; graphic card, usb ports..non-working..duh!

Besides the risk of having lost all the data, since the hard-drive wasn´t working (fortunatly backups exist for a reason, although their not so easy to make when your cd-writter was already screwed up...) there is also the problem of loosing less expensive ways to comunicate. Either by email or skype.

The Staff at the FM and a Portuguese Surprise

Kevin
Joey

Sara & Kev: Not part of the "Shark Team", but the first Portuguese that i found on US grounds; It was fun and at the same time strange when we both started to talk again in our Lusitanian Language*:) (*what´s this?: click here:)

Thank you for the Welcome Dinner Party with our fellow countrymen.
It was amazingly nice hear Portuguese words again, after we cleared off the English interference that was getting in the middle of our speech:)

From the Warm Weather into the Freezing Cold!

Chicago: A new city,a new reality.
A bit cold for someone who just came out of Miami who happened to be born and raised in the Portuguese fine weather.
It takes a while to get used to the cold and mostly, to the freezing wind of Lake Michigan!:)

Destination: Field Museum

Objective: Run tissue samples from our Sharks, determine sibship relationships and ID individuals.