Listen (QuickTime) to undergraduate student Anne Kellerman describe her experiences visiting the Galápagos Islands.
ANNE KELLERMAN: In the week before we went down to the Galápagos we broke into groups and developed our research projects. So we came up with our ideas or we kind of figured out what we wanted to look at while we were down there and then got into our little groups, came up with some hypotheses, some research methods, and then while we were there we collected data. My project—we were looking at sex ratios within the Galápagos sea lion and if the presence of males had direct relationship with the number of pups present. On a typical day we woke up with the sun usually and had breakfast all together and started our first excursion of the day. We might have gone up to one island to watch the albatross take off. They’re pretty amazing birds. They’re really big, but they’re not very good at landing or taking off, so we all witnessed it: walking over to the edge of the cliff, spreading its wings and stepping off. [Laughter] Once it’s in the air it’s amazing, they hardly flap at all. I hear they crash as opposed to land. Then after we’d go on our hike for a couple hours, we’d go back to the boat, grab our snorkeling gear and be taken by the dinghies over to the water where we’d jump in and usually see some sea lions which might come and play with us. There’s one student, Stephan, who, he just had this amazing experience with a sea lion that kept coming up and bumping into him an then swimming around and then bumping into him again and then eventually we had to leave to go back for lunch and the sea lion followed our boat as we drove away. It was sort of heart wrenching. [Laughter] Then we’d go back for lunch and then we’d go move locations and go for another hike, maybe another snorkel, have dinner together, just hang out on board afterwards.
