My interest in marine science and fisheries

My interest in marine science started at a very young age. I grew up in Levittown, Puerto Rico living minutes away from the local beach. My family would constantly take me to the beach, and my father loved fishing and would constantly take me fishing with him. We would go fishing in our local lagoon (laguna de Levittown) for tarpon Megalops atlanticus and common snook Centropomus undecimalis, as well as butterfly peacock bass Cichla ocellaris in lakes and reservoirs.

When I was 12, my parents decided to move to Orlando, Florida, where I could continue going to the beach and fishing quite frequently. Halfway through high school, I started thinking about possible careers and what I wanted to do with my life. I was confident that I wanted to have a career doing something that I enjoy, rather than chasing money and being unhappy. That was when I realized that I wanted to become a marine biologist. At the time I was not sure of what exactly I would focus on, I just knew that I wanted to work on understanding and conserving marine resources.

I received my B.S. degree in Marine Science from Florida Gulf Coast University in 2017. While pursuing this degree, I was exposed to many fundamental components of marine science, such as oceanography, ecology, and coastal processes. It was during this time that I realized I wanted to focus my career on working with fishes and elasmobranchs. With the university being close to the coast of southwest Florida (Fort Myers), I indulged in fishing while completing my degree. My favorite fish to target during this time was common snook along the beaches and passes!

About two years after receiving my undergraduate degree, I started working for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission's Fish and Wildlife Research Institute as a biological scientist at the Port Charlotte field laboratory. I became a biologist for the Fisheries Independent Monitoring (FIM) program, whose objective is to monitor long-term trends in the abundance of fish communities and economically important fishes within the estuaries of Florida. During my time working for the FIM program, my interests started shaping up as I was involved in many different projects that I really enjoyed being a part of (I will talk more in detail about my time at FWC in a future blog post. In the meantime, enjoy the picture (below) of a common snook work-up collecting otoliths and gonads, and extracting stomach contents!)

After a year into this position, I had many research questions that I was interested in answering. I realized that I needed to pursue graduate education to become a research scientist and/or a principal investigator (PI). Thus, I started looking for graduate student opportunities in different job portals. At this point, I had a fairly clear idea of what types of projects I wanted to be involved with, so I was being very selective with the opportunities I decided to pursue. Several months later, a coworker mentioned a graduate opportunity that included a research project working on examining tarpon stress response to angling in Puerto Rico. When I heard of this opportunity, I immediately thought that the position was created for me, and I quickly got all my documents together and reached out to the project PI. To make the long story short, I was not selected for the position, however, the PI offered another graduate position to me working on a project he had just got funded. This project involved introducing speckled peacock bass Cichla temensis into reservoirs in Puerto Rico (I also plan to talk more about this species and fisheries management in Puerto Rico in another blog post)!

After accepting this graduate student opportunity, I moved to Starkville, MS, to attend Mississippi State University. During my time there, my scientific skills were much improved and my interest in fish physiology was born! I had great mentors and a great cohort of lab members which made all the difference. I received my M.S. degree in Wildlife, Fisheries and Aquaculture in 2022. Before graduating from MSU, I was offered an opportunity at the University of South Alabama and the Dauphin Island Sea Lab, where I'm currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in Marine Science.

My dissertation research involves making contributions to the life history of groupers in the northcentral Gulf of Mexico. Groupers are ecologically and economically important reef-associated fishes that can be found across tropical and sub-tropical waters. Many groupers have complex life histories that include sequential hermaphrodism and a compound movement ecology. In the Gulf of Mexico, many grouper species support economically important fisheries, including red grouper Epinephelus morio, gag Mycteroperca microlepis, and black grouper M. bonaci. My overarching goal is to fill knowledge gaps that would aid the management and conservation of grouper stocks. Some specific objectives of mine are to:

1. identify larval settlement areas and develop species-specific larval identification techniques,

2. better understand the reproductive biology of data-deficient grouper stocks (e.g., gonadosomatic indices, batch fecundity, population sex ratio, size/age at maturity and transition), and

3. estimate age/size structure and develop growth models.

I am very excited to be working with a diverse group of fishes that are very important, both ecologically and economically. I hope to make meaningful contributions to grouper research and management. Finally, I hope to provide updates on my dissertation research in the future!