Guest MOP Student!

Ryan Tabata, a Marine Option Program Student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, came to share some cool experiences with the Marine Club students! Ryan talked about his trip to the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands and some of the scientific opportunities he was involved in. Students then got to explore the meaning of “abundance” and “diversity” by examining samples of M&M’s, similar to the kind of sampling that Ryan explained took place on the boat. Finally, since the NWHI contain an ‘abundance’ of coral we asked Ryan to dive into some detail about how corals live and feed, and challenged them by talking about the zooxanthellae symbiosis. Students got to make their own coral polyps out of egg cartons which they could use to demonstrate how the polyps look during daylight and nighttime hours.