Our last big trip was to the Bocas del Toro field station on the Caribbean Sea. Bocas is an absolutely beautiful place and a vacation destination, along with an amazing area of biodiversity and high tech science. This was definitely my personal favorite part of the trip. The first day we went snorkeling to several of the reefs just outside the field station with marine biologist Nancy Knowlton and post doctoral student Matthieu Leray. Along with seeing some amazing corals and fish, we got to extract one of the devices that they use to monitor biodiversity worldwide, referred to as an ARMS device. This device is made of PVC plates bound together in a way that allows marine organisms to attach and grow inside the device. We got a chance to take it apart and found a huge diversity of animals inside. 
A Brittle Sea Star
Shrimp! It's hard to tell from the picture but they were surprisingly large
The ARMS extraction process by IGERT 2014 (minus Blogmaster P)

--- Patrick



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    We are a group of graduate students from University of Illinois, Arizona State University and McGill University spending a semester in Panama at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute as a part of the NSF IGERT program. See details about each of us under the "About Us" tab!


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