My Internship At Waddell Mariculture Center - 1485 Words

For my internship, I decided to work at Waddell Mariculture Center in Bluffton. It is part of the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources and is one of the largest and most sophisticated facilities for mariculture studies. I was able to experiment and learn about many interesting facets of aquaculture over the 10 hours of working there. At this particular facility, they grow and research all kinds of aquatic species of fish and shrimp. Waddell was built during the years of 1983 and 1984. For the past 30 years Waddell has worked with a variety of different species of fish including Red Drum, Cobia, Black Drum, Spotted Sea Trout, and many more species. I chose to do my internship for a couple of reasons one reason was that my dad†¦show more content†¦Brine Shrimp start out at something called cysts which you can buy all over the world and it takes only one night in water for them to hatch into the Brine Shrimp. At a maximum length, Brine Shrimp only get up to a little o ver 1 centimeter which is perfect size for fish around 10 centimeters. I thought that growing the Brine Shrimp was one of the most interesting things that I did while I was there. Another thing that we did that was really cool was sample some Spotted Sea Trout that were about 2 weeks old. We got samples of fish to look at how much they they were eating. We also took their length and weight to see how much they had grown over 2 weeks and to make sure they were growing at the right pace. We took a net and walked through one corner of the pond and got about 20 samples and put the fish in a cup and took them into the lab. When we got into the lab, I had the sheet and recorded down the weight and length when he told me each one. We then compared it to the average weight, length and weight of 2 week old Sea Trout. Surprisingly they were over average which was not expected because it had been overcast and rainy the past week and that usually makes the fish not want to eat as much. We thou ght they would be under average. One thing that was really remarkable about looking at the fish was that you could actually tell if they were eating or