My experience during the Harvard Field Course - Biology and Evolution of Invertebrates (Part 2) by Maycol Madrid

Check out PART 1 if you haven't already seen it. 

Continuing with my experiences in this week-long class....

Although the main focus of the course was invertebrates I could not ignore the fascinating synchrony of this fish schools.

One group of organisms that make my week was the Polychaeta. Characters like the segmentation and their chaeta were some of the characters that I get to see in the lab but also, I found some beautiful ones in the coral rubbles and the ones that were in the reef were really beautiful. I try so hard to capture them in video and pictures but they are really fast. Hopefully I get to take some shots of them.

During the field trips, sometimes I took a break to see some really nice algae. I found this red alga called Dasya at 6 m deep I haven’t seen one big like that. 

In the fourth day of field trip I find this really nice shrimp that was on a sea anemone. He results to be very photogenic because he let me to take a big set of photos of him. Back in the lab I tried to look in some of the illustrated guides from the area to see which Genus it was but there were a lot of shrimps and all of them looks really similar.

The first day of the course I received instructions to be very careful with this kind of organisms. The one on the right is fire worm (Polychaeta) and they have little spikes that held some neurotoxins that will cause so much pain to the touch. The one on the left is an inverted medusa (Cnidarian) and they have a special type of cell called cnidocist and they held a filament that when is shot it get in contact with the skin and it produce a painful reaction.   

And so, the course came to its end and I have to say good bye to the class. But I will stay with a lot a knowledge that will keep in my mind forever. Most of the knowledge that I earn during the course gave me a new perspective about studies that could be done with organismal development and how it its related with gene expressions. 

I want to thank Harvard University for giving me this great experience.