Jennifer Zhou, 2016, Woodrow Wilson School

Jennifer Zhou ’16

As an intern in the Coral Reef Ecology and Optics Lab of the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS), my goal this summer was to further the development of the organization’s research within Bermuda’s mesophotic zone by exploring the abundance and distribution of lionfish, fisheries’ targeted fish, and the goldface toby. In order to assist marine spatial planning and species specific planning, my project was dedicated to modelling the potential effects and repercussions of the invasive lionfish on both known important commercial species and unknown biodiversity. The main question I was trying to answer was: Which types of environmental variables and fish associations determine the abundance and distribution of lionfish and other targeted fish? Through this internship I gained an immense amount of knowledge about marine biology, specifically on the identification of coral reef fish, and learned how to analyze numerical ecology in both R and GIS. Overall, I attained a one-of-a-kind research experience that will most certainly help me with data analysis and research projects in the future.