Lizzie's GoPro setup
Lizzie Morris, an undergraduate student majoring in neuroscience at Middlebury College, stepped out of the traditional bounds of her major and dove headfirst into the world of lobsters as our inaugural summer intern on Hurricane. Using our demonstration lobster traps, Lizzie captured and marked both sublegal- and legal-size lobsters and staged them in a monitoring trap rigged with GoPro video cameras in order to track their movement and intraspecies trap dynamics over a two-hour deployment off Hurricane’s pier. Lizzie poured over hours of video footage and found that there was a lot of trap traffic-- a surprisingly high number of lobsters (both sublegal- and legal-size) staged in each test round were able to escape the traps within two hours. Two hours was also enough time to attract new entrants, mostly sublegal females. Her summer concluded with more questions and possible avenues for this experiment, and we are excited to turn this pilot study into a longer-term project that involves our participants in the future!
