- I came to Duke for the Marine Lab.
I found out about it when I
was a junior in high school
and I've wanted to do marine science
since I was in middle school.
It's a small community of people.
There are 17 undergrads here right now
and half the time they're off traveling
so you really get to bond
with the other undergrads,
with the grad students who go
on the travel courses with you.
We have weekly seminars
and everyone just goes
and class is scheduled around that.
And it's just so even if you're doing
a similar amount of work,
you're not nearly as stressed
just 'cause you're at the marine lab.
My independent study here is with penguins
and I'm counting them using
imagery from the drones.
Since we can fly the
drones more frequently
than with satellites and planes,
we can, with the survey data,
monitor the populations
a lot more closely.
The results we're getting
is Torgersen Island
has a much smaller population,
which we already knew
from manpower surveys.
Avian Island is huge.
There is about 1,400
penguins on Torgersen Island
and there's 60,285 on Avian Island.
So the difference is massive.
Being in a community of people like Dave,
or any of the professors that I've had
who just so clearly
love what they're doing
and want you to love what they're doing
and it's so welcoming.
You're undergrad, but you're in the labs.
You're doing the research.
No one has gotten to touch
the penguin data yet.
It was just thrown at me
and that would never happen anywhere else.
This semester I did a travel course.
I went to St. John.
We did independent projects
for a week over there
and my partner and I are
trying to publish that work.
We looked at how wave action,
or sedimentation might stress them out.
We noticed that when you go
to touch them they retracted
and so we wanted to see if
that was A, a stress response
and also if wave action
might stress them out
and ultimately we were
interested in seeing
if that could explain their distribution
in the bay that we were studying.
I remember when our professor
came up to us after,
kind of on our last day,
we were about to take the ferry
to go to the airport and he was like,
"Hey, I think you guys
can publish what you did."
We just stared at him in disbelief
and said, like that can't be real.
We're undergrads, but we studied mollusks
and there's a small
journal on just mollusks
and we're goin' for it.
