Spring Semester Adventures

This semester has been an incredibly busy and productive one for the Childress lab! We started out presenting four posters at the Clemson University Biological Sciences Annual Student Symposium. We had a poster that examined the relationships between macroalgae, parrotfish and coral in the middle Florida Keys and one that looked at the dietary preferences of the parrotfish species in on the reefs in the Keys. We also had a team present a poster on the denning behaviors of juvenile spiny lobsters and the population structure and adaptations of the Hawaiian stream goby. Each of our presenters did a great job. Congratulations to Sarah Hoffmann for winning third place for best undergraduate poster!

This semester, we conducted our first spring monitoring trip in the Florida Keys during spring break! We were excited to see several of our cages still in place and coral transplants still doing well. The parrotfish were still as abundant as ever and continued grazing during observations. I am looking forward to spending another summer in the Keys.

After a week in the Florida Keys, we headed north to Jacksonville for the annual Benthic Ecology Meeting. We were so proud to represent the Childress lab with three poster presentations and three oral presentations. These included oral presentatio
ns by Seniors Sarah Hoffmann and Brandt Quirk-Royal, a first for the Childress lab!
 

Back in Clemson, our lab presented four posters at the Focus on Creative Inquiry Poster Forum on April 3^rd. Each poster was judged by faculty and graduate students on objectives, clarity of the project and results, and overall presentation. Congratulations to Brandt Quirk-Royal for winning first place out of 140 posters!

This semester, our Creative Inquiry will be graduating four senior students. Their contribution to our lab and family has been monumental and we are so proud to see them continue on. Katie Cunningham will be attending dental school at the Medical University of South Carolina this summer in Charleston. Sarah Hoffmann will be moving to Boca Raton where she will be attending graduate school at Florida Atlantic University, where she will be studying lionfish. Brandt Quirk-Royal will be heading to North Carolina to work with the Bald Head Island Conservancy with their sea turtle protection program. Julianna Ellis is currently in the interviewing process with Disney to work in the Nemo and Friends Exhibit with the dolphins and manatees.

Congratulations to all of our graduates! Good luck with your future endeavors and keep in touch!

This summer we will also be welcoming four new students to the Creative Inquiry team: Kelan Drake-Lavelle, Daniel Coster, Randi Sims, and Jared Stevens. They will be joining Emily O’Connor and Taylor Burgess in the fall to begin a new year of data analysis and presentations! Welcome!