My name is Julie Vecchio. Pretty much since I can remember I'd wanted to be a marine biologist.
I took a pretty circuitous route, but eventually got a masters degree in marine biology & landed a job at Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission. FWC Website (if you're interested).
I worked for the Fisheries Independent Monitoring section randomly sampling estuarine fish & using video to count groupers & snappers in areas where we can't dive very easily to count them.
After working there about 6 years, I realized that watching fish on TV was not the only thing I wanted to do with my life, so I took a leap of faith, quit my job, & got a job teaching high school science at Saint Stephen's.
After about 6 months I realized that teaching high school biology was not the ONLY thing I wanted to do either, so I started to get back in touch with some contacts from my research days. Which is when my summer schedule started to fill to the gills...
I will be participating in at least 2 research cruises studying 2 different aspects of reef environments.
First: (Leaving tomorrow...I think) A trip to the Dry Tortugas National Park. It's probably the 2nd most remote national park in the country (the Northwest Hawaiian Islands has it beat by a mile). It lies 60 miles west of Key West, sticks out into the Gulf of Mexico & is 90% underwater.
I have been on 2 research cruises to the Dry Tortugas before. One was counting & measuring large reef fishes. The next was counting tiny, cryptic fishes living in & among the corals.
On this trip I will be learning all about things that I've considered "habitat" up until now. Despite my masters degree in Marine Biology I've had little chance to really study reef-building corals. On this trip I will be learning to identify hard, reef-building corals as well as learn the methods used measure them in the FL Keys and Dry Tortugas. It will be a completely new experience for me.
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