Options for research assistants

The Research Assistant project in Cuba is a single 4 week schedule designed to provide assistance to the Centre for Marine Investigations at the University of Havana who are completing a reef fish and benthic community surveys of the reefs of the Southern Isla de la Juventud APRM (sustainable use area), determining use of the beaches in this remote area for turtle nesting and estimating the population size of manatees.

Volunteers on this project will be mainly based in the Colony Hotel with day trips out on the research boats, except for the time they are working on the more distant reefs when they will be based on the Felipe Poey Research ship for a few nights at a time. Those who are not already dive trained will be spending the first week completing a PADI Open Water dive training course. Those already dive trained will be spending part of their first week on the Felipe Poey ship helping with the stereo video transects and the photo quadrats. The remaining part of the first week will be based back at the Colony Hotel and helping with the transect, point counts and side scan surveys for manatees.

In week 2, all students will be completing a Caribbean reef ecology course based at the Colony Hotel but with day trips on one of the research ships with in-water practicals to help training in the identification of the reef fish and coral species likely to be encountered. A major part of this course will concentrate on learning how to analyse the stereo video data.

For weeks 3 and 4 the students will split into 3 groups who will each rotate between the manatee surveys, shark project, sample collection the reef and analysis of the video fish and benthic data collected. For the manatee and video data analysis, the groups will be based in the Colony Hotel whilst the reef and shark group will be based on the Felipe Poey ship.