Caitlin Lyman's Internship Experience
Last summer, I was lucky enough to receive an IRES fellowship to participate in the Research Internships in Science and Engineering (RISE) program in Konstanz, Germany.
It is a program offered through the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), offering a plethora of internships for North American students in all areas of Chemistry, Physics, Biology, and Engineering. The RISE program is a wonderful opportunity for international research which places you with a PhD student in your field of interest. Germany has so many world-renowned research institutes and is an exhilarating country to work, live, and travel in.
Through this program, I conducted ten weeks of fish ecology research under the supervision of Reiner Eckmann and Wolfgang N. Probst at the Limnology Institute, University of Konstanz. For our research, we assessed the juvenile fish population of the Bodensee (Lake Konstanz) using hydro acoustic surveys, pelagic larvae nets, and littoral beach seine nets. The pelagic catches were mostly Eurasian perch (Perca fluviatilis) and burbot (Lota lota). On a few occasions we also found three-spined stickleback (Gasterostreus aculeatus), ruffe (Gymnocephalus cernuus), and bleak (Alburnus alburnus). With echo-sounding, it was observed that larval burbot engage in a daily vertical migration from a depth of approximately 40 meters during the day up to the upper 10 meters of the water column at night.
To understand this, our team used a 1600 micrometer net at several depths to obtain day and night catches. In addition, we used a 250 micrometer zooplankton net to characterize the zooplankton population at different depths during night and day. In the lab, I conducted zooplankton counts and stomach analyses of the larvae in order to find a correlation between the two. Some preliminary results suggest that the burbot larvae migrate vertically in order to follow their preferred prey, copepods of the order Cyclopoida. Another observation of our fishing campaigns was that the perch larvae stayed in the pelagic zone of the lake longer, rather than migrating to the littoral zone as usual. We hypothesized that this may be a result of the long period of hot weather or the effect of recent re-oligotrophication of the Bodensee, but further studies on the density and growth of the larvae must be done.
In conducting these studies, there was a lot to learn and adjust to while being in a foreign laboratory. It was a much more laidback environment, and all my colleagues were so friendly. They had coffee or cigarette breaks at least every hour, beach volleyball on Mondays, soccer on Wednesdays, and work always ended early for a colleague’s birthday party. When my research team would go out for a day or night of fieldwork on the boat, we’d always finish up the fishing campaign with a round of cold beers for everyone. Since I was in Germany for the World Cup, it was common knowledge that the work day ended at 3:00pm on days when there was a Germany soccer game. In all, the Germans knew how to work hard and enjoy life at the same time – it made for an amazing summer experience!
Konstanz is a beautiful city, and through my internship I had a wonderful time becoming familiar with the culture of Germany, while also gaining priceless research experience. Last summer was a great supplement to my biology studies at Emory, and the lab and field work gave me valuable insight for my future endeavours. While Emory provides a multitude of pre-med oriented courses, fish ecology and limnology classes are not offered, so this summer experience gave me the exposure I was looking for. I highly recommend an internship with the DAAD in one of the most culturally-rich and scientifically advanced countries in the world.