Studying bluefin tuna: depicting the environmental characteristics of the southern bluefin tuna nursery grounds in the Indian Ocean
Mentors: Estrella Malca and David Die
Estrella Malca is a Senior Research Associate II with CIMAS at the Southeast Fisheries Science Center’s Population and Ecosystems Monitoring Division. She has been with CIMAS since 2007. Dr. David Die is the Associate Director of CIMAS and a research associate professor in the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School. He teaches graduate-level classes in population biology, population dynamics, and marine ecosystem management.
Format:
This is an in-person internship.
Brief Description:
Southern bluefin tuna is a valuable, highly migratory species widely distributed across temperate oceans of the southern hemisphere. Mature adults migrate to a single known spawning site between Java and Australia in the eastern Indian Ocean. Information about southern bluefin tuna early life history in the wild is largely based on fisheries surveys conducted > 35 years ago. As part of the 2nd International Indian Ocean Expedition, the Bluefin Larvae in Oligotrophic Ocean Foodwebs, Investigations of Nutrients to Zooplankton Program (“BLOOFINZ-IO”) sampled the southern bluefin tuna spawning grounds during the 2022 spawning period.
The intern will calculate zooplankton biomass from plankton samples and develop geographic distribution maps for zooplankton biomasses from experimental stations and non-experimental stations. In addition, the concurrent environmental characteristics of each experiment will be examined for the various parameters measured (temperature, salinity, etc) at sea. These biogeo-datasets will be archived via an official data submission to the Biological & Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office (BCO-DMO, www.bco-dmo.org) by the student intern.
