The Pull of Home

Abstract

One of the great pleasures of teaching field courses for students is the ability to travel and explore new habitats. Since my training lies in the aquatic realm, my field courses involve the exploration of the wide diversity of aquatic habitats. These can include the more familiar coral reefs, streams, and rivers but also bogs, fens, and marshes. Given their relative accessibility, most of these habitats are close to a shoreline and shallow in depth. The exploration of the open ocean or even some of the world’s large lakes is often difficult to perform for undergraduate or even graduate courses. It is not too much of a stretch to say that science knows more about the solar system than the ecology and biology of the deep ocean and large lakes.