- Meredith Kintzing
- Old Dominion University
Norfolk, VA
mkint001@odu.edu
Growing up in land locked Pennsylvania, I did not get to see the ocean, but for one week a year on our family vacation. Although I always loved my time on the beach and in the water, it was not until my junior year of college when I enrolled in an oceanography class that I began to entertain the idea of a career studying marine communities. I got my first field experience the following summer as a technician at UNC's Institute of Marine Sciences. Playing with buckets of algae may not sound like tons of fun, but it only took me one day to be totally hooked. I was shocked there were so many crazy little critters that form communities in what I had previously thought of as seaweed. The next day I rearranged my fall schedule so I could take marine ecology and learn more about these communities.
After completing my undergraduate degree at UNC, I continued to work as a technician at the Institute of Marine Sciences. Over the next two years worked assisting with various research projects ranging from studying the oyster reefs of North Carolina to experiments involving sponges on the coral reefs of the Florida Keys. During my tenure as a technician I worked on the surface support team for the 2003 Martens mission, which was my first experience with Aquarius. Swimming around Aquarius and watching your dry friends inside is one of the coolest experiences. It's like being on the inside of an aquarium. Being on the outside of Aquarius made me really want to check out the inside, and I had my first opportunity to do that during last years abbreviated mission.
This past fall I enrolled as a doctoral student in the Ecological Sciences program at Old Dominion University, working under the supervision of Dr. Mark Butler. My research focuses on the role of the spotted spiny lobster (Panulirus guttatus) in shaping Caribbean coral reef communities. Relatively little is known about P. guttatus, but as an obligate reef dweller, this species has the potential to have a huge, possibly trophic cascading impact, on its community.
Although the research we will be conducting over the next two weeks studying sponge nitrogen cycling is slightly different than what I typically do, when Niels offered me the opportunity to return to Aquarius, I could not say no. I am psyched to work with this fabulous group of scientists again and look forward to learning a lot from them over the next two weeks. I hope to be able to integrate some of what I learn into my own research.
