The first week or two of any expedition is typically the most stressful week of any expedition, as it involves settling into new locations, planning and figuring out routines.
We have now moved into our new house and are able to start off the projects!
Whist settling into our new house, we have been learning some fish species identification for Fraser's project which investigates diver’s perceptions of reef health. There are close to 1400 known fish species in the Andaman Sea, so we have been slowly learning them by breaking the list down into families of relatedness.
With the arrival of advisors Charlotte and Neil who stayed with us for 10 days, we have been practicing dry runs of the belt transects for Shion and Fraser’s project ahead of wet runs in the water. We also went through all our dive protocols and dive management skills. The team has spent the week intensively training with Charlotte and Neil in the water improving on the skills needed for scientific diving.
The day before they left, we had a series of workshops covering many useful topics such as Rstudio data analysis, using Microsoft excel, scientific writing, qualitative data entry and analysis, and academic CV writing. We would like to send a massive thank you to Neil and Charlotte as their help and advice for our projects and expedition overall has been extremely helpful.
We have also managed to start collecting some data for Shion’s coral project, examining coral reef composition across many different dive sites in the Andaman sea.
Interviews for Melanie’s project have began too, looking at perceptions of shark populations from different groups of people in Phuket such as divers, fish market sellers and fishermen. We are looking forward to collating the data from her project and learn more about the shark trade in Thailand.
We are all hard at work continuing with data collection and are looking forward to starting the initial analysis for the results !
Over the last week one of our team leaders Shion turned 22! To celebrate, on our day off we visited Kata beach in the afternoon and visited Phuket's night market in the evening!
Some pictures from the night market!
Stay tuned for more updates!!
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